Cycle Three - Should Curriculum Address Controversial Issues

                Should curriculum address controversial issues?  To me, this is a very important topic.  I have very strong feelings about curriculum going farther than teaching just reading, writing, science, math, and social studies.  This is not all that we teach, so our guidelines should include more as well. 

I spend my days working with 17 first graders.  At least an hour, spread out through the day, is spent teaching my students acceptance, caring, and kindness.  All the qualities I expect them to exhibit as human beings.  Some days I have more conversations about how our words effect someone else’s feelings or about how it is ok be to different or about what is hurtful laughter than I do about addition, matter, and digraphs.  I do this because when those students are in my classroom and in my care I try to make sure they will feel safe to be themselves.   I have watched a countless number of students poke fun, tease, and even torment each other.  The sad news is that it is starting at younger ages.  I remember elementary school feeling like we were all on level ground.  It was middle school that I started to notice a change.  7^th grade is the first time I can remember being picked on.  Now I have seen first grades laugh when a student gives a wrong answer, third graders playing a game where they are contaminated if a student they don’t like touches them, or fourth graders making a list of girls they think are lesbians and writing “stay away from” on the paper.  It is at these young ages that their ideas on how to treat each other begin.  It is at these young ages that we need to start teaching them that acceptance and tolerance of those that are the same and different is the way to treat each and every person.

 I know that I am not the only teacher that spends time on this subject matter and I think it would be helpful to all of us if there was some type of curriculum to work from.  I am constantly trying to come up with new ways to get my students to understand exactly what can happen if they are not careful with the way they treat one another.  I agree with some of the skeptics that some of the subject matters are too much or above the heads of the younger students.  Designing a curriculum that gives teachers kid friendly and developmentally appropriate ways to talk about these issues would help in the understanding process.  We should be able to talk to them not just on a surface level.  If we can talk about the differences in color and religion in elementary schools, we should be able to talk about sexuality too.  I took a class over the summer that discussed multicultural reading, having books available for students to be introduced to characters that are similar and different to them.  We talked in great length about how this was important for all students, so that those that are different feel welcomed and those that aren't can see that differences are ok.  Since that class I have been working on building up multicultural books.  In my classroom, culturally, my students are very much the same.  It is important for them to broaden their horizons, to see that when they walk out of that building into the world that not everyone will look and act just like them.  This is most important for those students that don’t hear these things at home.  I was raised were this was a conversation my parents had with us.  I remember walking around an antique fair with my father when I was in high school.  We had just walked past a gay couple.  He turned to me and said, “Katy, you accept everyone no matter what they are like.”  This was not the first time I had heard this from him.  It was from my parents that I learned to be an accepting and tolerant person.  I strongly believe that all people should be treated equally.  If our students are not hearing this at home then I feel it is my job to teach it to them at school.  My parents always told me, “You don’t have to like everyone, but you do have to treat them as if you do.”  I think this is the best advice I have ever gotten.  It is this that I want to pass along to my students.

http://www.procon.org/sourcefiles/they_belong_in_the_classroom_4-06.pdf

This article is about the need for a controversial issues curriculum.  It talks about a High School teacher in Colorado who was teaching these issues in his geography class.  There was of course an uprising about this.  It proposes a seven step model called Issues Analysis.  This model is supposed to embrace these issues in a proper way.  

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=1679439 

This is an article about the teacher mentioned in the article above.  Jay Bennish was suspended for comparing Bush to Hitler in a lecture during his class.  His students walked out in protest of this decision.  It looks at a teacher's freedom of speech.

Cycle Two - What should schools teach? How should they be held accountable?

This week we are looking at what schools should teach and how they should be held accountable.   As a teacher these questions often come up but I never feel that I myself can answer these questions.  This is because a teacher’s opinion on this subject usually seems to not matter.  It is the government, the district, or school administration that tells us what to teach in our classrooms and how we will be held accountable.   I teach from the standards set for my grade level.  I am supposed to teach using the curriculum picked out by my principal or district administration and I am judged as a good teacher or not based on how my students do on a test picked out by the state, the district, or in my case now, the principal.  I have always felt that there is a problem with this.  The people who are telling me what to teach and how to teach are not in my classroom.   They are not working with my students.  They are not a witness to the challenges or to the accomplishments that take place each day.  It is for this reason that I believe that these questions, “what should schools teach and how should they be held accountable”, should have a teachers input when being answered.

The readings this week looked at many different viewpoints on what should be taught in schools.  We were able to learn about a middle school that teaches through video games or a high school that focuses on teaching students about their possible vocation.  These ideas are interesting.  I am sure they get kids excited about learning and school, but I also believe they work for specific kids only.  As a person who has never really gotten into video games, nor have I ever been very good at them, I’m not sure I would be as excited about learning through that process.  Whereas the students that attend that school thrive from the experiences they are having, I am not sure that I myself would succeed.   The vocational high schools are great, assuming that the students know what their passion and future career choice is going to be.  I have a few friends who are in their late 20s still trying to figure that out.  The point I am trying to make is that each student is different.  It is a wonderful idea to offer a different choice to our regular school setting, but I don’t think that these choices can be a complete replacement.  There are students who thrive in the schools that they go to now.  Those students may not want a change. 

Another question that arose in my mind while learning about these schools was what about Elementary schools?  How do we get the younger students excited about learning?  The Studio School and Quest to Learn are not offered to the Elementary age.  I have worked in three different school districts and three different grade levels.  I have had students, even in Kindergarten, that were already unmotivated and had no drive to learn.  How are those students reached?  To me the answer is something that my school is working towards right now, differentiated instruction using the multiple intelligences.  The focus is to plan lessons that try to reach each student’s interest and learning style.  It allows the teacher to engage their students in reading, writing, math, science, and social studies in a way that will directly relate to them.  It takes a lot of work and time.  It forces the teacher to really get to know their students and what makes them work.  This idea to teaching gives way to things such as blogging, creating games, making up a cheer or a play.  It allows the students to make choices and have a say in their own learning.  It is also something that can be used for all age levels.  I can tell that my students are more engaged in my phonics lesson during small group when they are playing a game on my ipad.  They have also been more encouraged to do their spelling homework because they can choose how to practice their words each night.  At the end of the day the most important thing is to have students who learn.  Any idea that creates that is a good one to me.

http://www.differentiatedinstruction.net/

This website is about differentiated instruction.  It tells you what the program is and how to use it.  It also gives resources and events, as well as introduces you to one of the people who wrote a book about this topic.  You can find workshops to go to on this website as well as set up to have them come talk at your school.

http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/journals/ed_lead/el_198809_brandt3.pdf

This article looks at the use of philosophy in a school curriculum.  It is an interview with Matthew Lipman, who believes that teaching philosophy is “the best answer to the call for teaching critical thinking.”