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.) |
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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 |