Throughout this course, we have taken a look at the reasoning behind what curriculum is, what content should be seen in a curriculum, and whether or not controversial issues should be implemented into a curriculum. This week, our focus is a bit different as we were asked to look at how curriculum should be produced. This is a topic that quite frankly boggles my mind as it is difficult to pinpoint the right or just way of generating a curriculum. It’s especially difficult to brainstorm and create a curriculum that meets the needs of a variety of learning styles, intellectual levels, socioeconomic statuses, age groups, genders, ethnic groups and the list goes on. Therefore, it can be concluded that in order to generate a genuine and beneficial curriculum, a number of factors need to be in place to ensure authenticity within the curriculum.
In the United States
The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was an act created not be teachers or people who have worked directly with students, but by politicians who don’t really understand what makes an effective curriculum. They have no idea what it means to teach students and yet they were the ones that created our entire curriculum, telling us teachers what to teach. Along with telling us what to teach, they also told us that this amount of students need to be proficient and/or advanced in math and reading or you will losing school funding or be closed down.. It always frustrates me when people who aren’t teachers try and tell me what I should do, when frankly, they have absolutely no idea. So why is it that people who are not directly working in the school systems are telling us teachers, principals, reading specialists etc. what to do?
In the article “How Christians Were the Founders?” we see a group of devout Christians working as part of the Texas School Board inevitably making decisions of what concepts are addressed and not addressed in their social studies curriculum. I couldn’t help but laugh while reading this article. I find it to be quite ludicrous that people who have no teaching background, but more notably are using their faith as the driving force as to what is taught in a public school system. In all honestly, I first thought that the article was a joke. While yes, our founding fathers were devout Christians, we can see that our current nation has quite a diverse population of races, ethnicities, religions, sexual orientation, genders etc. and therefore, it is quite “outdated” to create a curriculum that does not implement this mentality. Our nation is known as an American melting pot for a reason. Therefore, it is essential that the people who are brainstorming and creating the curriculum are people who have worked directly with students in a class setting, who understand the major components of pedagogy, and who come from a variety of diverse backgrounds to ensure that multiple student subgroups are thought of as the curriculum is being made.
Another major component that needs to be established is determining what the overall objective of this curriculum is going to be. Some questions to ponder when thinking about this are: What are the overall outcomes of this curriculum going to be? What do I want these students to know and be prepared with by the time they graduate? What ways can I motivate these students to want to learn this curriculum? In his article, Ralph Tyler brought up several ideas which address these questions above, looking at several methods to enhance curriculum production. A major idea seen in the article is “learning experiences.” As stated, “The term learning experiences refer to the interaction the learner and the external conditions in the environment to which he can react.” (p. 63) He captured this idea by bringing up the idea of how two students can be in the same classroom, learning the same concept and can have two very different learning experiences from it. He emphasizes that, “The problem, then, of selecting learning experiences is the problem of determining the kinds of experiences likely to produce given educational objectives and also the problem of how to set up situations which will evoke or provide within the students the kinds of learning experiences desired.” To put it simply, we need to make learning engaging and authentic for ALL STUDENTS. Differentiated instruction, while a very difficult philosophy to implement for every student, is and will always be the driving force of what will make a curriculum possible. Our current curriculum does not illuminate this philosophy and this is why so many students leave high school having to take remedial courses in college or who drop out all together. We want America
As stated in my first post, the objective behind the Common Core Curriculum is to make students college and/ or career ready when they graduate from high school. There will be much more rigor in the concepts taught, but there will be less standards to teach each year leaving more time for true mastery of the concepts. Not only that, but these standards are known as anchor standards meaning these are what must be mastered by the end of the students’ senior year. The grade-level standards work as stepping blocks to help ensure that mastery is achieved. Along with this, people who work in the school system were among many represented in the planning process for this new curriculum. Not only that, I am apart of the team at my school helping educate my co-workers about the new curriculum to help make the transition less overwhelming. At the workshops, they asked for educators to give their input on the drafted curriculum to ensure that it’s as ideal as it can be. While I still have some skepticism towards this curriculum, it is quite a step up from our current curriculum and hopefully it will make education less about the data but more about the abilities of those individual students who represent that data.
Generating a curriculum should be seen as a long vigorous process. Firstly, the brains of the operation should not be random people on the street or people who are not experts in the field of education. I don’t go to court pretending to be a lawyer, so people stop acting like being an educator is easy. It’s a profession and a pretty complex one at that. Having educators from a variety of backgrounds should be apart of the planning in order to meet the needs of a multitude of learners. Along these lines, there needs to be clear outcomes for the curriculum and there needs to be a clear correlation between the objectives presented and the individual students who are learning them. Curriculum should not be scripted since every classroom dynamic is different; nonetheless, there should be clear guidelines to the curriculum to allow teachers to accommodate to benefit his/ her students. In conclusion, curriculum needs to be made for the students by the people who know them best.
Problems with Education - Very Funny Video
Additional Resources:
Common Core Standards This website provides further information concerning our new curriculum that will be implemented fall of 2013.
Importance of Education An interesting article that focuses on where thinking should lie when it comes to what really matters in education.
Sarah,
ReplyDeleteI found myself agreeing with much of what you discussed in your post. I too am continually baffled by the fact that people with little to no background in education are the ones who are often left in charge of making important curriculum decisions. How does this make any sense?! I get that we are dealing with a public school system and therefore we have some accountability to the government and elected officials, but do they need to have THAT much influence? I don’t think so. As I mentioned in my original post, I think there are a lot of people who think that just because they went to school themselves that they know how a classroom should be run. I really don’t think those outside of the profession understand just how much goes into being a successful teacher and designing an effective curriculum. It is not as easy as it looks!
Though there are some problems with what we are asked to teach in the classroom, I think the bigger problem is what we are asking our students to do with the curriculum. You say that our current curriculum is failing our students and that they lack motivation and rigor because they don’t see how a standardized test will help them in life. I think this is a very important point to consider when questioning how effective curriculum is. Sure, there are plenty of teachers who take the curriculum beyond the requirements and really get their students to engage with the material, but at the end of the day, this is not what our students (or us as teachers) are graded on. It all boils down to the ability to answer some multiple choice questions – a method I think any teacher would agree is not the best way to assess a person’s comprehension of a topic. I don’t blame students for blowing off these standardized assessments because really, what’s in it for them? And what message are we sending when this is the “most important” test that they will take as a student? Do we only want to students to be able to answer a multiple choice question on a topic, or do we want them to be able to DO something with the material? If our assessments remain like the MME, can we really expect the curriculum to get any better?
I too am a fan of the Common Core as far as having a standardized curriculum goes (if we have to have this structure, I think it is a step in the right direction). I think it asks students to dig deeper and think more abstractly, rather than just memorizing facts and figures. Going back to the idea of assessment, one thing I find very encouraging (yet scary) is the way students will (supposedly) be assessed on the material. From what I’ve seen of the new assessments, project-based questions will replace random multiple choice questions. For high school math, the questions are real-world based and ask students to take one central issue (i.e. designing a yearbook) and then answer several questions based on this topic. I think it gives students who don’t do well on multiple choice tests more of an opportunity to demonstrate what they know. Though this is certainly a better way to assess students, it is daunting to me as a teacher knowing that I will be held accountable for how students perform on these new tests because they certainly seem to be more challenging. Obviously a lot is still up in the air as far as how these assessments will roll out but I am curious to see how they will change the approach in the curriculum and in the classroom.
Emily
Hi Sarah,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your work here in this post!
I'm with you on much of what you have to say here. I'm particularly interested in your support of the CCSS. I'm open. I know these standards are meant to be broader, and reading what Emily said about the new assessments gives me some greater hope as well. (I actually feel like we had a perfectly good set of national standards produced by the various professional organizations back in the 1990s--but hey, as long as we can stop this constant treadmill, I say again, I'm open.)
I'll just note that Tyler has a slightly different focus than you. You note that we should ask, "What do I want these students to know and be prepared with by the time they graduate?" And that does seem the current drive--knowledge and preparation for a future where students will have to apply that knowledge.
But we do know that this application is messy, and it can't start too early. It other words, we should focus on what students do. And that for me is the really important and interesting point Tyler was making. We should pay attention to how students are living their lives--and how they go about living them after they leave us. So even if the new tests require more abstract thinking, I'm still a bit sad that they are still tests in the narrow sense--a figuring out on paper, rather than an acting in the world.
Think about this with teaching. We are finally (duh!) realizing that you really can't teach a person to teach at a university--you can really only do that in a classroom with students. Hopefully, we can change that more, and start to make teacher education more about the doing of teaching, rather than the knowing about teaching.
Don't get me wrong--both are important--for teaching and for anything else. But "knowledge" is more than something in our head. It's revealed in the life we live. I can "know" that I need to eat healthy--but if I don't eat healthy, then I don't really know it! I think this notion of "the bottom line is in action" is really helpful for schools to think about.
That's where you youtube clip was so interesting. It's probably true in a weird way--in terms of the knowledge retained, we probably could do this in five minutes and for $20. But if that's true, what does that mean? Does it mean we should work harder so that people remember more stuff five years out? Or does it mean we need to start shaping habits and practices in the here and now, so that we are not left wondering five years down the road?
Very rich and interesting post! I'm hoping we are finally moving in the right direction and that educators like you will take us there!!
Kyle
Ok, sometimes later works out better. Having read what Emily, Sarah and Kyle wrote here, I keep coming back to something I wrote and then something that Sarah wrote:
ReplyDelete-Unqualified people often write, or dictate the curriculums thrust upon schools (me).
-I don’t blame students for blowing off these standardized assessments because really, what’s in it for them? (Sarah).
I think that these two comments sit in the crux of any question regarding state-determined curriculum.
THe first problem that I see with Common Core is that while it was very nice of the state to ask educators (qualified, but only so much...see my post) to help write it, qualified personnel will have little if anything to do with the administration or measurement of these standards.
That would make a nice Cycle, by the way...what matters more, the content of curriculum or the administration and measure of it.
The state has consistently shown that the purpose of content standards has not been to improve rigor or student achievement, but rather to create measurable benchmarks for student learning. In otherwords, the agenda is to square off the sides of a round peg to make it fit into a square hole. Learning is measurable in the most vague and interpretive ways available, far to round for the square hole of a data-oriented state-run institution.
In the end, there is nothing in it for the kids when they take their test. Those that are pursuing a college education can retake the ACT portion as they see fit. The now-defunct scholarship attached to the MME was only a marginal carrot in its day. One can claim all sorts of moral reasons, but in the end, the average high school student is able to ask the one question that we can't honestly, in good faith, answer for them "Why should this test matter to me?" Of course, the typical authoritative replay would be "Then what is you solution to measuring student learning of the state's curriculum standards?" and, of course, I don't have one. If I did, I'd package it, sell it, and then make sure I wasn't around to see it fail like any other one-size-fits-all measure of kids unique as snow flakes.