I'm revisiting Curriculum 21, edited by Heidi Hayes Jacobs. In one of the chapters written by her ("A New Essential Curriculum"), she discusses myths that shape our schools. The first myth she mentions is that "The good old days are good enough," the idea being that the adults in charge that grew up in that community try and keep the schools in "time-check" out of comfort or nostalgia. Below is a quote from that chapter regarding that myth that really hits home with me, especially after experiencing many years in education at 5 different school districts. I think it serves as a warning that without change, there can be no growth or innovation...and we will be forever stagnating, shackled by our own memories.
It doesn't make sense to deconstruct standards into your own student-friendly objectives and then use some pre-packaged purchased curriculum to teach those objectives. The companies that make that pre-packaged stuff don't have your students' specific needs in mind. They have selling their stuff as their bottom line, no matter how much research they throw at you in their sales pitch.
It doesn't make sense to not work at trying something new because you may have to change it the next year or the year after to meet differing student needs. Trying and changing and trying and changing are how we grow as professionals - and how we meet the differing needs of our students from year to year. In my years of teaching not once did I ever have a group of students that ever had the same needs as the ones I taught in previous years, and I had to adjust my instructional methods accordingly. Remember that it's our job to teach all of the students in front of us, not just the ones that can learn using the methods we prefer. It doesn't make sense to not change what you do in your classroom because it's been working for you for years. It's been working for you, but has it been working for all those different students that have been marking time in your classroom? It doesn't make sense to not try something new because no surrounding schools are doing it. If it's based on what's known to be good for kids, go for it - and understand that the path to making it the best it can be is going to be messy and nonlinear. Do what's best for your students, not some other district's students. As this post says, be a blueprint - not a copy. Let's make our own way and then look at other districts when we need to do that. It doesn't make sense to not do what's good for students because the community doesn't understand why you're doing it. What's best practice in education has changed since a lot of people today went through school, and it's our job to educate them and promote understanding rather the divisiveness and misunderstanding. What does make sense is to make what you do your own in terms of what's good for your students. There are few things more disturbing to me than giving teachers permission to do what's best for our students just because the fear of doing something nontraditional (but in line with current best practice) is stopping them or the fear of deviating from what's in the textbook series is not allowing them to develop a more aligned curriculum that has more of what those students sitting in front of them actually need. Like the tagline of this blog says, just do what makes sense for your students. Even if people think you're crazy. So you're a teacher who hates standardized testing. Or you hate the Common Core. Or the math series the district has adopted. Or the new assessment literacy initiative. Or the new district benchmark testing system.
Or maybe you just hate them all. And you know what? That's OK. The beauty of this country is that you are allowed to dislike, hate, and/or loathe whatever you please, for whatever reason it is and with whatever evidence you have. But you know what's not OK? Transmitting that hatred and negativity to students. What's the gain in asking students how much they're sick of testing as a question of the day? What's the gain in rolling eyes when students are told that they have to learn it because it's Common Core? What's the gain in making sarcastic remarks about district initiatives to the entire class? There is no gain. Unless you count getting around 30 younger humans to hate something for pretty much no reason other than the teacher hates it so it must be the right way to feel about it as a personal win. Transmitting that negativity isn't going to stop the crazy standardized testing train we're on, and it won't change the fact that we are held accountable for teaching the CCSS. And it won't change anything else that people hate about what's mandated these days to go on in schools. If it won't change any of the things that are hated so much, then what's the gain? There is no gain. It's been quite a year being a curriculum director at a new district, especially with some of the duties of educational technology landing in my office. I am not only new to how PARCC testing is run, but I am also not used to learning all of the technology required to implement PARCC and other assessments - this includes MAP testing (new to my district this year), ACCESS testing for our ELL population, and the state Science Assessment in grades 5, 8 and high school. Frankly, it seems like my life since January has been one long series of batch file uploads and data integrity checks. I have to get out the craziness that has been second semester somehow, but I don't have any more words. As my assistant can tell you, I barely speak in complete sentences these days anyway. (It's usually me shuffling through some sort of user manual and then saying, "OK.....OK...then we have to...........OK" and then getting up and leaving to wherever my brain just told me to go.) Because I probably can't connect too many more sentences together coherently, I'm just going to tell my semester's testing story in memes. Why memes? Because memes are freaking awesome. January: I quickly found out where my priorities were. February: So much data. So much wrong data. So much data we thought was correct...but was wrong. Many confused PARCC newbie calls and emails to the state and Pearson ensued. March & April: Let the testing begin. We used every device we could get our hands on, including iPads. The iPads quickly become the most hated testing device due to all of the tantrums they threw when running the testing app. One teacher said I should assign them to any teacher who complained about testing as some standardized-testing form of teacher punishment. May: Months of testing has affected my brain. But I emerge victorious. And still alive. But then I found out it never ends. Never. Not in Illinois, anyway. (By the way, please don't think I'm making light of what the students have to go through. I hate standardized testing of any kind and what it does to students, so it's one of life's little ironies that I have to run it this year. But it's been such a nutty crazy year managing the tech, assessment, and curriculum sides of things, my only outlet at this point is humor. So please...see the humor and humor me. And don't think that I didn't enjoy the job - while it's been a whirlwind of testing craziness, I think I've had the most fun this year than I've had in many, many years....because I got to learn all sorts of new stuff and work with some great people who tolerated me not finishing any sentences and scampering off to places unknown.) Whenever teachers are revising curriculum either in my district or when I do off-site workshops, at some point I get called into the discussion. My first questions usually address whether or not the content is addressed in the standards for our state and in what context. But, more importantly, I ask these questions:
Why do you teach that, anyway? What's the point? I get a variety of answers depending on the group. Sometimes I hear that the content in question is because that's what's always been taught in that grade level or course. I often hear that students will "need" that content for the next grade level/course, and that it's a good thing to expose them to it (What the heck does "expose" mean, anyway? Are we teaching by mentioning? Are we doing "just in case" teaching, just in case a teacher at an upper grade level requires them to know it?). Sometimes I even hear things like "because we decided it would be fun to teach it even if it isn't in the standards." To me, those aren't valid reasons for teaching students anything. The only good reason for teaching something is to help students learn the skill of transfer. Some content is chosen for us via state standards, and some is necessary background information so students have something with which to make connections to new knowledge. But the main end of teaching is for students to use that content in a meaningful way so they learn the skill of transfer, so the content doesn't remain isolated on an island of it's own, never to be connected or used again after the unit test, left alone to starve to death, forgotten. And it's a teacher's job to provide opportunities to practice transfer with carefully chosen content to get that job done, not memorizing a lot of informational bits they'll never ever use. As Grant Wiggins stated, "The point of school is not to get good at school but to effectively parlay what we learned in school in other learning and in life." Maybe I ask the wrong question when I get pulled into curriculum discussions. Next time I'll ask, "How will students learn the skill of transfer?" At a recent meeting of a committee I am chairing, we were discussing what would be the best program to challenge our academically talented students. And then I opened Pandora's Box.
I brought research. This committee is made of parents and educators, and when you have that mix of experiences, you must educate everyone. That's why I brought my research with me on the topic, using meta-analyses and effect sizes and descriptions of what works and what doesn't. What the research said was that the self-contained model we used in the past didn't work as well for academically talented students as other strategies, such as subject-based acceleration or performance grouping. It's not that a self-contained model didn't work - it's just that other strategies worked better. And that's when people's experiences from the past got in the way, arguing for what we used to do for these select group of students. So what do you do when the research you present doesn't jibe with what people want to do based on their own feelings, experiences, and biases? What do you do when you get statements that say we should do what we did in the past, even though they have research in front of them that states what we did in the past isn't as impactful on learning as other options? What do you do when people want to go with what they know rather than what they know is better for students? I don't have an answer for that, other than keep hammering away about what research says works. However, I know that now that the information about what works is out there. And how can we justify to our community doing something that we know isn't as good for kids as something else? When it comes to decisions, I come down on the side of research and students every single time. I think it's been firmly established that real learning for students requires work, struggle, and a growth mindset on their part. But so does real teaching. I've said this before; I've lived this reality in my 18 years in the classroom with thousands of students. To some teachers putting in the extra time and effort comes as second nature, and they constantly seek to improve, to try, to refine, knowing that things may not always turn out exactly as planned - but they learn what they can and move on. They don't stagnate where they're at - these teachers moving forward at all times have developed a habit of continuous sustainable improvement, always working on getting better at their practice. And that habit takes a lot of time and effort outside of the classroom. It's that type of continuous professional improvement effort on the part of all educators-teachers and administrators alike- that's needed to move schools forward. As Levin and Fullan state in their 2008 article Learning about system renewal: "Large-scale, sustained improvement in student outcomes requires a sustained effort to change school and classroom practices, not just structures such as governance and accountability. The heart of improvement lies in changing teaching and learning practices in thousands and thousands of classrooms, and this requires focused and sustained effort by all parts of the education system and its partners." Changing teaching and learning practices through focused and sustained effort. If that's what's required to improve schools and student learning, then it means we can no longer accept the following in our school cultures:
Focused and sustained effort on constantly getting better. That's what it takes to move schools forward...but we also need to recognize what will hold us back from improving teaching and learning. When I left teaching to go into administrating, I left all of my teacher stuff out on the interweb so that others could find it and use it. However, I often get requests to access my other teaching materials that are found in my Google Drive. And I always say "yes" to those requests, because I truly believe that together we all get better - and sharing what we have and allowing others to make it better is something we should all be doing.
To make it easier for those who want to access that information, I am posting the links to all of my Biology and Physical Science resources below. Just be forewarned - they are organized in the half-organized disorganizedness that suited my style best, so you may have to dig a bit to find anything specific for which you are looking. (I did put stuff in folders, but I made liberal use of the Drive search options.) To those of you who ask me for my lesson plans...I did write lesson plans because I had to do them. However, the plans were based on my I can statements and what my current students were capable of in any given school year, so I'm not sure that looking at them will help you out - they changed every single year. Also, I housed them on the hard drive of a computer I had two computers ago and never got them into Dropbox, so they are lost forever except in a file cabinet somewhere in my old principal's office. Enjoy, and if you have any questions, please feel free to email me or fire away in the comments! Biology: My Biology Class Website Google Drive Biology Resources Physical Science: My Physical Science Class Website Google Drive Physical Science Resources Why? It's the one question I don't think we as educators-teachers or administrators-ask ourselves often enough. Why do we teach what we teach? Why do we grade the way that we do? Why do we do this lab activity? Why do we have students write this essay? Why do we have the classroom rules and procedures that we do? Why are we having teachers sit through this professional development session? Why do we have teachers turn in lesson plans? Why aren't we requiring teachers to improve and grow in their practice? Why aren't we making any forward progress as an organization? There are lots of "whys" we should be asking ourselves. But we also need to be honest with ourselves when answering those whys, as well as evaluating the quality of the answer. Because if there is no answer or the answer is anything like, "Because that's what we've always done" or "Our community won't allow it," those aren't really valid reasons for maintaining the status quo. If the answers to our "whys" have nothing to do with what's best for students, then we need to make a change, and educate anyone involved in why the change that's being made is best for students. The "whys" help us improve, help us move forward, and help us start doing amazing things for students and their learning. To me, "Why?" is one of the most important questions educators can ask, because it helps us make that relentless forward progress schools and districts need to be making to do right by our students. Image credit: Bart Everson via Flickr I'm a curriculum director. Not a curriculum dictator. "Just tell us what to teach," I hear. "That's your job." No it's not. I will give direction, such as "we're going to work towards integrating our science curriculum" or "we need to make changes to our curriculum so we are more closely aligned with the state standards." I will give options to consider as we move in a certain direction, I will answer questions about specific implementation, and I will go gather research and ideas. I will sit with teachers as they are wrestling with lesson and unit design and help them as much as I can by asking guiding questions and telling them if what they're doing will enhance or inhibit student learning. But I will not dictate specifically what teachers should do and how they should do it. It's about ownership. It's about having skin in the game. Teachers are in front of their students day in and day out - they know them best and should be making those on-the-ground decisions. I'm also told I should just give teachers the curriculum by purchasing a math or reading series so that way we would be automatically aligned to standards and teachers could just follow whatever directions are in the series. Well, I think we all know by now that textbook companies make textbooks to sell textbooks, and I've seen many a text (especially math texts) that slapped a CCSS standard on already existing textbook pages and called it "alignment." I've also seen the damage that can be done by telling teachers to follow the scripts in a textbook series - teaching becomes mindlessly doing tasks with students without any connections made for students about what they're doing and why they're doing it. The learning gets lost amongst all of those steps. I do understand why teachers ask me to dictate rather than direct. Some teachers feel as if they're not qualified to design curriculum, feeling that textbook writers are the experts, so they adhere to whatever the textbook says they should do. Other teachers, like some students, are afraid of failing. What if they design something for their students and it doesn't work? What if they're "wrong?" What they don't understand is it's not about being wrong...it's about trying to do better and be better for our students. Teachers developing curriculum from standards and then designing lessons from those standards is a part of that cycle of teacher growth and development - trying something, tweaking it, trying it again, or trying something different. It helps teachers grow in their practice rather than stagnate, and gives them the needed autonomy to design the right learning experiences for their students. And I refuse to take away that autonomy by dictating. As long as we're all moving in the direction of doing what's best for kids, I think we're all doing the right thing. |
Upcoming Presentations:About the Author
I'm a K-12 Curriculum Director who loves to put things in parentheses (like this) and overuse hyphens--like this. I also abuse semicolons with wild abandon; I just can't help it. Crazy Teaching: Just Doing What Makes Sense by Terie Engelbrecht is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Archives
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Action-Reaction What It's Like on the Inside I Taught My Dog to Whistle Teach Science (.net) ThinkThankThunk My Island View Life of an Educator Edumacation Developing Education Real Teaching Means Real Learning Against the Wind for the love of learning The Tempered Radical McSquared Delta Scape Shifting Phases |