Enacting Curriculum

All Lakota Students Will Achieve to Their Fullest Potential

This is the mission statement of the district that I work in. After reading articles about enacting curriculum that is potentially flawed or doesn't allow for flexibility by teachers to fit the needs of their students, I don't know how we can live up to that motto. I do think that curriculum is very important because it can help set clear goals for teachers and students. However, I think that sometimes educators get too caught up in the minutia of their subject and they don't allow for student discovery which leads to student achievement.

I like the ideas set forth in the article, "Put Understanding First" by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe. I think that they have some great ideas about making learning applicable to all students so that they actually learn by discovering on their own and not just from lecture or reading a textbook. Their ideas would be great for the type of student I teach since my kids are generally less motivated than others in more advanced classes. Which this makes me think that maybe there should be different curricula for different levels of student.

Since my last blog, I have tried starting a new unit with a real life problem that needed to be solved, but I think that I can do a lot better than my students finding the distance between my house and Lexington. (Though I was amazed at how many of them didn't know that the distance from the river north to exit 19 was about 19 miles.) I also liked this article because they had an application of how to apply their strategies to a Math class. Most of the time when I read educational articles they are always applied to Social Studies or English. I always have a hard time envisioning some of those ideas put to use in my Math class.

I do think that the curriculum at my school does allow for some freedom though. It is not so structured that we have to teach certain topics a certain way. Morey Schwartz talks about this being a huge flaw in education in his article "For Whom do We Write the Curriculum?" where he discusses the idea of curriculum being a learning tool for the teacher. He has an idea that curriculum should be like a dress rehearsal for our classes in which the teacher tries out the curriculum first and then helps the students through it. This would allow the teacher to have the feeling of going through the learning process and remember what it is like to be in the students' shoes. Then the teacher can create more meaningful lessons that will help all students learn.

I like this idea to some extent. I think that it would be hard to "relearn" everything you know in a really authentic way. I would rather start with some key questions and then work from there to solve real life problems. Even now, I am thinking that I am going to have to come up with some better options for my scenarios. I like the idea of presenting mean, median, and mode by giving students a list of race times from 4 classes and having them decide who won (Wiggins). Maybe I can help students figure out how much they will have to work to be able to save enough money to buy the car they want. When I think about doing that, the Cosby episode where Theo thinks he can survive on this own runs through my head. His dad gives him some Monopoly money and then ends up taking it all back to represent rent, food, insurance, etc. I may have to invest in the game of Monopoly!