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.
Katelyn,
ReplyDeleteI completely agree that it is sad and what we have been driven to by the Department of Education that most teachers live to teach to a test and about test preparation. Although, I do think it was important to place an emphasis on making sure that teachers are teaching what they are supposed to teach. I feel that the efforts to just make sure that teachers teach what they need to backfired and made teachers teach to a test and it actually made most teachers take the creativity out of their lessons.
You and I both know, because we are fairly new teachers, that students need more than just walking them through a textbook. It is also important to realize the technology surrounding students and learn to embrace and use the techmology to help students learn. We also know how much things have changed since we were in school. Everything is being pushed down the grades, which tends to put so much pressure on teachers to get our students to know and understand everything they are supposed to know.
I found an interesting article called Children Anxiety from Academic Pressure: Are We Pushing Our Children Too Hard. The article discusses how a frustrated parent made a documentary called the “Race to Nowhere.” Much like you stated it discusses when is enough enough? At what point are these kids allowed to just be kids anymore and how the impact of placing this academic pressure on them is not even beneficial. Isn’t our goal as teachers that students find an interest in our content and actually enjoy doing the work that pertains to it, instead of making them stress out and hate learning. When in all actuality we want our students to be lifelong learners. It is so vitale to make learning interesting for the student. We need to make sure that the lessons we teach have something that pertains to the world around us. This way students will realize the importance of the things they are learning and can see how the things they learn, the ideas we want them to embrace, actually have relevance in everyday life.
Now state tests and college entrance expectations have made the competition so much more competitive and fierce than ever before. Since going to college is one of the most significant changes in most peoples’ lives, don’t we want to encourage college not discourage it?
Thankfully, curriculum across the nation seems to be changing for the better to allow students to do what they should always strive for and that is to think critically. I believe state tests are changing to be computer adaptive tests that strive for students to be able to apply information. If you check out the Common Core website you can see how things will be changing for the better. Although I teach high school math and that is a world of difference from elementary it is still important to see how your future students will be tested.
Laurel
Hi Katy,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your work here! This is a very well written, concise and thoughtful post. I enjoyed reading it!
To me you are really on to something. When I read Dewey with a group of my doctoral students a few years ago, we got into this big discussion about how curriculum is for the teacher, not the student. That seemed like a really important discussion at the time, and I actually see you making the exact same argument here.
If we take Dewey as his word, and the child and the curriculum are two limits to a single process, then of course something needs to mediate that process or relationship. That thing, of course, is the teacher. Right now, it seems there is a big temptation to have teachers take giant spoons and try to force-feed kids. As Dewey would say, it's as if the child is forever tasting but never eating!
So curriculum serves as this map for teachers, it tells them what is possible within the confines of being human. We take this notion of a range of possible experiences, and select those that we think would be most beneficial for the kids in our care (differentiating as much as we can), and then set about shaping an environment in which the child is guided towards the experience we wish them to have.
Curriculum would guide teachers, I think, in this ideal sense. We see the scribblings of a child, we see the art of a Michelangelo, and through our work, lead out the one toward the other. We are nature's short-cut!!
So, you got me thinking about all of this. And I just couldn't agree more on the developmentally appropriate issue. Of course some kids are able to do fifth grade math in second or third grade, but some aren't. Reasonable standards seem to me what a rather large majority of children can achieve with a talented teacher over one year. Of course, kids who are further behind when they reach school will not be as far along, in some cases. To adjust the curriculum on their behalf opens us up to the accusation of "lowering standards." We have somehow believed that by magically stating all kids should know x by y makes it likely this will happen.
Thanks again for your work--very helpful for my own thinking as well!
Kyle