All teachers should be at the heart of the curriculum development process for their subject area, but in my district they are not. This is the persistent problem I created my podcast about.
In my district usually a small group of teachers is hand-picked to represent all teachers in a given discipline, and that committee works with an administrator or two to make important decisions about what should be taught and how it should be assessed. The result is that the majority of teachers feel resentful and distanced from the curriculum they are asked to work with. Of course the classroom experience for the children suffers and learning is negatively impacted.
Conditions do need to be optimal for really great curriculum to be created. Teachers need to be experts in the subject they are teaching, and they need to have knowledge about the learning process of children - not the knowledge that may have been available when they were trained, but the latest research. The central office should be responsible for the support of teachers toward keeping up with research about learning and should insist that teachers maintain and extend expertise in their subject.
Curriculum development takes time if it is to be done well. Summer work is a great opportunity for trimester-long curriculum to be developed by groups of teachers. (Mornings during the school year before 7:30 is a terrible time for important work that demands care and creativity!) Some districts provide regular weekly early release days - this is also a great way to make sure teachers have the time they need. Top countries like Finland and Singapore allow for swaths of time as part of the regular school week for teachers to do the part of teaching work that cannot be done with students present.
Until we harness the expertise of our teachers for curriculum development we will continue to impoverish our classrooms with weak programs.
You are right, putting the right people together with enough time and we could actually do this. Building the right "vehicle" of time, grouping and content for teacher work is really very similar to teaching and learning in the classroom. We need a goal/target (agreed upon would be great) that comes from an essential question or probelm. We need to collectively state what we already know. We need guidance and information that will lead to great resources. We need each other to collaborate for learning that will effect the group to occur. And so on.... This process mirrors great taching and learning, yet when you put a group of educators together we don't get there. Time, the one thing we need more of gets wasted. The process has to be structured for time to be efficiently and effectively used. A clear process will help bring the people, time and content together. I've been working through bits of this process this summer with small groups of teachers and we are figuring out the key steps for a larger crowd that will work together during workshops and early release this year. It took us 2 years to get those days for this work though. Process can be such a slow thing.
ReplyDeleteIt's wonderful that you have persevered and have made it possible to do some collaborative work in your district. Change seems to need to happen in small steps in our schools. I do get impatient!
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