Curriculum in My Classroom

Some may not see it as such, but I have had the unique experience of working in a struggling district. I have spent the 3 years of my teaching career seeing the change from a lack of an effective curriculum to instruction completely driven by a well-planned, fully implemented curriculum.

When I first started, my district was struggling to keep our heads above the NCLB/CATS waters, however there seemed to be little change occurring in order to offer up some form of organized success. Within the last two years, administration at both the district and school levels have changed over and the effect was immediately felt. Before, our curriculum was designed around state standards as "End of Primary" and then Fourth, and Fifth. There was little to look at in terms of activities or what was expected at each specific grade, we just knew what was expected overall. Being a kindergarten teacher, it was difficult for me to rationalize what was being taught at the other grade levels. As kindergarten teachers, we would find that while teaching "patterns", the first and second grades were doing the exact same activities. Not at all what you would call an effective curriculum. This soon led to our school pushing to "unpack the curriculum". We would meet in core content areas with a representative in each grade level. We would determine what part of the core content or state standard was appropriate for each grade level, as well as the appropriate taxonomy to be used by each. We began building a system where each grade level would dive deeper into the content than the previous grade. This helped our teachers to establish what we exactly needed to be focused on at each grade level.

While our school was busy breaking down the "curriculum barriers" of our district, the powers that be at the district level were beginning to do the same. Our district is primarily considered a Title I district, which has allowed for government funding to be used in the form of content coaches that are available to every school. Over this past summer, our content coaches took core content and state standards and completely broke them down into objectives, congruent activities, vocabulary, and possible forms of assessments for each grade level. This new curriculum guide has become an extremely valuable resource to all of our staff. I use the term "guide" lightly as we are required to follow it as this is enforced by district walk throughs where the coaches and principals evaluate lesson plans to see that they are all aligned to the curriculum. While this may seem to have taken the creative juices away from the teachers, the coaches considered that as well. Once a month, every teacher attends a "collaborative planning" in a specific content area across the district. At these collaborative plannings I am able to meet with the content coaches and other kindergarten teachers from across the district to discuss what worked in the curriculum, what didn't and how we plan to implement the upcoming weeks of curriculum. The coaches listen to us, learn from us and then add our ideas onto our interactive web-based curriculum guide. We then return to our schools and share out with our grade level teams. These collaborative plannings have not only given us an outlet to express concerns and joys, but also great partnerships with other teachers in the district. We are often emailing each other tools that we are finding successful and sharing ideas on a more daily basis if necessary.

The newly created curriculum guide designed by my district seems to fall right in line with Backward Design as we focus on rigorous assessments and task analysis (prerequisite knowledge and skills) prior to instruction. Our district has also acknowledged the issue of teacher implementation as discussed by Morey Schwartz but mandating district walk-throughs where we are scored by our "proficiency" levels in following the curriculum guide, among other school related needs and concerns. An aspect that our curriculum does lack, however, is application and transferance. In the days of state testing and NCLB, the concept of "post school" seems to become lost. There are times when I feel that I am forced to teach a student to properly take a test and answer the Open Response question with the adequate amount of bullets and graphic organizers instead of focusing on "do you know the content?", "do you understand the content?", "do you relate to this content?", and "will this content help you become a productive and self-assured adult?". As much as I break down "power verbs" in order for a student to properly answer a question, I'm not so sure that they will be quizzed about power verbs in a job interview. Hopefully, in the time to come the need for application tasks and transferance will be considered and applied. Till then, I will continue to shut my classroom door when I am focusing on an application task. :)