Cycle one asks us the question, “What
is curriculum and what is its purpose?”
This is a hard question to answer.
Through the readings and my own experiences I have come to realize that
there are many different answers. Every
teacher, principal, school board, state official, researcher have their own
opinion on what curriculum is and what it should do.
The last three years I worked in
Pasadena, Texas. It was a great
experience being able to leave my comfort zone of Michigan and see how things
are done in another place. I can
honestly say that my ideas of curriculum that I gained throughout undergrad and
my internship were very different than how it was viewed by most in the school
district I worked for. Their common definition
for curriculum was test preparation.
There were many discussions on how will this look on the test or how can
you narrow down the multiple choice questions.
I remember a fellow teacher talking to me about the all-important “strategies”. These consisted of things such as, circling the
title and paragraph numbers in the story (because that helps students to read
and comprehend). I am happy to say that
after my first year teaching things began to change. Their ideas about curriculum started to stem
out from just preparing their students for the state standardized test. Unfortunately this change was brought on by
the change of the state standardized test, but all the same it started to
change. There were some teachers who
then viewed curriculum as the text book that was offered to them. I like and agree with the statement made by
William Schubert in Perspectives on Four Curriculum Traditions, “….,they
all agreed that curriculum is a great deal more than the textbook.” (Schubert,
1996, Pg. 1) I believe, as do many
others, that there should be more to a curriculum then what I saw by some in
Texas.
Curriculum to me is supposed to
guide teaching. It is supposed to tell
us what the students need to learn and give ideas on how best to get them
there. It is not a book that you follow
from cover to cover. To me, curriculum
is a plethora of useful resources that help me to create engaging lessons that
support every one of my students understanding the state standards. I have now worked at three different schools
(including my internship year). At each
school they had different ideas on curriculum.
My internship year I taught Kindergarten. The teacher had worked for that school as a
Kindergarten teacher for 30 or so years.
Her idea of curriculum was a tub for each month full of worksheets. I remember it was rare for her to pull out the
GLCES or a resource. On planning days
she pulled out the bin and her lesson plan book from the year before. I learned that year to create my own
curriculum. I used the GLCES as a starting
point. I used the internet, other
teachers, and mailbox to plan my lessons.
I have learned a lot since that year, but overall my lesson planning is
the same. Even now when I work at a
school that offers me a curriculum for each subject, I use those as a guide and
continue to look other places for ideas that will work best for my
students. That is how I view curriculum:
a guide to helping me reach each of my students. It is as many of the authors from our
readings pointed out, not one student is going to learn the same way. They are not all going to respond to a lesson
the same and they are all going to take something different away. That is why I have to do my part to find as
many different ways as I can to teach the concepts that they need to know.
A big part of curriculum is the state
standards. These set up what each
student will learn. In the Sharon Otterman
article we were asked to think about Donovan as well as other students and try
to decide what they should learn. This
country is pushing and pushing for more academics. I can’t tell you how many times I have had
the discussion with a student’s parent or my own peers about how Kindergarten
today is what First Grade was when we were all in school (which I like to tell
myself was not that long ago). I think
back again to my time in Texas. I taught
third grade for two years. At the end of
my second year the state was working on changing the math standards. The rumor was that each grade level was going
to have standards that were originally set for two grade levels above
them. This means that my third graders
were now going to be expected to learn and master standards that were being
taught to fifth graders the year before.
This change was coming despite the fact that my third graders were
struggling with the concepts that they were already being expected to master. I asked my principal and colleagues at what
point does someone say, “This is no longer developmentally appropriate.” When do we stop pushing the 5 year olds or
the 8 year olds or the 12 year olds and remember that they are still kids? I also struggled with the time constraints in
which our students are expected to learn all of these standards. When will someone take into account that I
not only need to teach my students reading, writing, math, science, and social
studies, but I also need to teach them how to talk to a friend, how to
apologize when you accidentally bump into someone as you pass by, or that it is
not ok to pee all over the bathroom floor?
I think that the standards and the curriculum should include and allow
me time for all of the things that I need to teach my students to make sure
that they will grow up to be successful citizens.
Resources
This website has a similar
message as our other readings in that it looks at curriculum as more than just
how I see it, as a guide to planning lessons.
It describes what curriculum is.
It points out four curricula that are used in schools: the official curriculum, the taught
curriculum, the learned curriculum, and the tested curriculum. These four curricula break apart what really
happens to curriculum in a school. It
details explicit and implicit curriculum as well as the null curriculum, or
what gets left out and why.
This website looks at what
curriculum is as well as how and why it should be used. It focuses on using curriculum to build your
lessons. It looks at curriculum in four
ways: as a syllabus, a product, a process, and a praxis.
