What's more important - following a curriculum because it's the District's curriculum or adjusting the curriculum to meet the needs of your students? Teaching isn't a race. It's not about who can teach more quickly or the most stuff. It's about sparking learning, teaching relevant skills using engaging content as a vehicle. And that takes time. Sometimes more time than a curriculum map will allow. How can you expect teachers to innovate in their classrooms but tell them their hands are tied by the map? In the area of science, this makes no sense in the face of our new NGSS standards, which inherently require more time for students to tinker, make mistakes, think, develop solutions, and write than ever before. I'm not against curriculum maps. I wholeheartedly believe that what's being taught and how it's being taught should be written down and mapped out. A curricular plan should be in place. The merits of the content of the map should be discussed, debated, argued, reshaped, reformed, and rewritten on a regular basis. The value of a curriculum map is that it is something to have discussions around, a document that can generate new ideas about what should be taught, how it should be taught, and WHY it is being taught. It should be a guideline, not a curricular prison. A map should be flexible, changeable, and nimble. A curriculum should grow with teachers, not stunt their growth. Maps should not be used to big-brother someone. They should not be used as a measuring stick to determine how good of a teacher someone is by how well they finished the map that year. Maps aren't something to hold over teachers' heads. I understand we have to hold teachers accountable for teaching their curriculum, but what if teachers want to move beyond the map? Should that be a strike against them? You can't expect innovation and progress when teachers are expected to do the same things every single year and for every single student. What if we hold teachers accountable for moving forward rather than evaluating them on how well they can stay in the nice and neat little places dictated on a curriculum map? Image credit: Flickr |
Kim
12/11/2014 07:22:06 am
This is so true - my district creates the curriculum map AND the timeline, then creates the semester exam. If you don't hit the mark THEY think you should hit, then your students will be penalized because you didn't get to all the information the district thought you should get to, so they do poorly on the exam. Never mind that none of them have been in a classroom anytime in the last 5-7 years, so they have no clue what we in the classroom are dealing with. Sadly, they don't trust us to decide how/when/what to teach. When we complained about their unreasonable schedule, they told us we were "teaching too much", and we should "cut out the extra."
Terie
12/11/2014 07:40:41 am
I think you nailed it with your comment about trust - teachers need to be trusted that they know their students and they know what's best for their students. Of course, that depends on how regularly teachers are professionally developed in a meaningful way so that they know new techniques and strategies. It also means a mindset on the part of district and building-level administration that content is not king - learning is, and teaching students to learn is the goal, not content coverage. Comments are closed.
|
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
May 2016
Categories
All
Blogs I Read:
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 |