Cycle Four: How Should Curriculum Be Generated?

I was enlightened to the public spectacle that curriculum can generate as I read through the New York Times article “How Christian Were the Founders?” In it, we learn about the big decisions the state of Texas was making in regards to its Social Studies curriculum. With a majority of the sitting board of the Christian Coalition, members were attempting to rewrite the curriculum to include not only more Christians (among them Billy Graham) but also to add a more Christian slant on history.

Whatever the final decision that was made about the additions to the curriculum, it was obvious from the article that this decision did not lay in the hands of the people responsible for relaying it to the students: teachers, but rather a group of business people and/or politicians whose expertise lay in other fields. Don McLeroy, a vocal member of the Texas board, made no bones about the fact that his professional qualifications have nothing to do with education. “I’m a dentist, not a historian,” he said. “But I’m fascinated by history, so I’ve read a lot.” (NYT 2) However, it wasn’t the board that was responsible for figuring out how to implement this new curriculum- that fell to the teachers. “The process in Texas required that writing teams, made up mostly of teachers, do the actual work of revising the curriculum, with the aid of experts who were appointed by the board.” (NYT 5) Experts it seems with the same biases as the board.

I think the thing that shocked me most about this article was the misunderstanding involving Bill Martin Jr. As someone who works with small children, I cannot recount how many times I have read Mr. Martin’s books. “Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See?” (which aids children in making associations between colors and meanings to objects) “Polar Bear, Polar Bear What Do You Hear?” (that helps toddlers identify zoo animals and the sounds they make), “Panda Bear, Panda Bear What Do You See?” (which encourages conservation) and “Chicka, Chicka, Boom, Boom” (which teaches children about the alphabet) are all favorites among the under 3 set. I was surprised Martin, a native son of Texas and arguably “America’s favorite children’s author” would be left out of History because of unfounded accusations. “In this case, one board member sent an e-mail message with a reference to “Ethical Marxism,” by Bill Martin, to another board member, who suggested that anyone who wrote a book with such a title did not belong in the TEKS. As it turned out, Bill Martin and Bill Martin Jr. are two different people. But by that time, the author of “Brown Bear, Brown Bear” was out.” (NYT 9) Teaching Bill Martin Books

Looking at other important, yet “controversial” people in American History, I wondered who else would soon be out like Bill Martin, JR. Ben Franklin, inventor and Founding Father whose illegitimate children and mistresses may soon become a problem for the Christian Coalition? Benedict Arnold is painted as a traitor, but under his guidance, the Americans won one of the most decisive battles of the American Revolution. He became frustrated and bitter when he was passed over as a representative in the Continental Congress by military and political rivals who not only tried to claim credit for his accomplishments, but also charged him with corruption leading to an investigation where he was ordered to pay the Congress when he had already spent his own salary on the military operation. Who wouldn’t be angry, and yet the only Benedict Arnold we read about in history is the traitor. What about President Harry Truman who ordered the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan killing thousands? Do we wipe clean the slate of American history those men and women who, while serving our country in one form or another also had questionable political-ties or morals?

I agree with Cynthia Dunbar, a Christian activist on the Texas board, when as she put it, “The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.” (NYT 2) I disagree with Ms. Dunbar that making everything “Christian” is the best way for our government to function in the next generation. I hope we are raising educated children who are able to think, defend, and dialogue about what is truly worth remembering.

I found the Tyler reading “Basic Principles of Curriculum Instruction” to be helpful in getting the “bigger picture” idea on generating curriculum.

Before beginning to write a curriculum, we must first take into account what skills we want out students to have obtained when the lesson/unit/class is over. Tyler outlines 4 major skills in his writings (68-82); among these are thinking (relating ideas instead of remembering and repeating, develop logical arguments, can not be immediately obtained from textbooks), acquiring information (developing understanding of particular things, knowledge about various things, viewed as functional, and has a value in itself), social attitudes (a tendency to react even though the reaction does not take place-emotional concomitants that does not result in a required change of attitude), and developing interests. I see a contradiction in the way I taught high school and the way I am currently teaching preschoolers. As a high school teacher, and maybe because of the emphasis on test scores, a lot of my lessons focused on teaching skills mostly from acquiring information with a small nod towards thinking. I had high hopes that my students would develop interest in the subject area, but left little time to discuss their attitudes about different topics. As a preschool teacher, the skill set tends to more rounded, but I still tend to focus on developing interests, acquiring skills, and thinking, added to some time for social attitudes. They play dress-up and count with blocks, read stories about how it is OK to be different and to like who you are, and sing ABCs and the days of the week. Interaction with the world and those in it are keys to their continued educational growth.

I found that a lot of the effective teaching that I had done in Maryland to prepare my students to take the HSA (the test that each students is required to take and pass in Science in order to graduate and receive a diploma) had been forethought by someone who knew how to write broad scope curriculum and utilized some of the tools Tyler writes about.

Tyler talked about organization in curriculum being both vertical-between grade levels- and horizontal-between subject areas. Calvert County employed the vertical organization of curriculum to prepare students for the Biology HSA (the test is given to 10th grade students). Biology is the study of living things and among those things are plants, animals, and the environment, things most notably taught about in Environmental Science courses. While many schools teach Earth Science, an “easier” science, to 9th graders, Calvert took a look at the educational objectives that needed to be reached for students to pass the HSA, discovered that these are also met in the Environmental Science curriculum, and changed their course offerings so that students took Environmental Science as ninth graders and Biology as 10th graders, hoping that with effective teaching and evaluation, the students would do well on the HSA. It seems to be working as Calvert students perform well on the test.

Connecting Biology and Environmental Science in this way not only allowed the students to retain information from one year to the next, but it showed students how the two related to one another. “If they have no appreciable connection, the student develops compartmentalized learnings which are not related to each other in any effective way when dealing with his own everyday life.” (84) Students often ask, “why do I need to know this?” and math and foreign language are two places where students can readily see the connections between what they have learned and what they will learn. I see the importance in doing this more effectively in my own classroom.

Evaluation is key in not only determining what students are learning, but what is effective and what is not. As Tyler suggests, you cannot determine how effective a teacher or curriculum is by giving one cumulative exam at the end of the year, or even a mid-term in the middle (although two evaluations are better than one). “One is not able to evaluate an instructional program by testing students only at the end of the program…It is clear that an educational evaluation involves at least two appraisals—one taking place in the early part of the educational program and the other at some later point so that the change may be measured.” (106) At Calvert, HSA Biology students were given a lot of evaluations to determine how they were doing. Each student took a test at the beginning of the school year that measured how much of the material he or she already knew. Throughout the course of the school year, benchmark tests(based on public release questions from previous HSAs) were given that measured not only what the students were learning, but also included questions from previous material so we knew how much the students were retaining as well. As the scores were compiled using computer software, I was able to analyze how each student was progressing and could make a pretty accurate estimation on how well they would do on the test in May. These benchmark tests were time consuming, and the software we used was not cheap, but the energy focused into teaching and reteaching was well worth it.

Teaching Earth Science, and student teaching in Michigan, I know that evaluation could be done better. My own experience as a student I was well acquainted with the “shovel and dump” method of doing school; cram the night before enough to be able to spit it out the next day on paper and then forget it. No actual long-term learning was taking place and if my schools had done evaluation as Tyler suggested months later, they would have seen an A- student with C- grades.

Additionally we must remember that it is “the reaction if the learner himself that determines what is learned.” (64) As teachers we can carry out exquisitely planned lessons, link to things in other classes, using prior knowledge that the student had gained from other lessons, and analyze the data that we receive from evaluation, but it is the students who must take responsibility for their learning. That does not let the teacher off the hook in the slightest,; we must be on the lookout for unexpected outcomes “that may develop from a learning experience planned for other purposes.” (68) We do not want to teach our students to hate our subjects either by placing too much in their hands. As a student in high school English literature, we read a lot of Shakespeare and I hated it. I could not comprehend what was being said and grew extremely frustrated. While I was eventually given the tools to do so, the reading still gave me no pleasure. To this day, I cringe when I hear a Shakespearian play or poem. My teachers taught me comprehension strategies, but an extreme dislike for the work.

As I continue to think about this information, I am mulling over a quote from Tyler’s writing, “Given an objective to be attained, a student must have experiences that give him an opportunity to practice the kind of behavior implied by the objective.” (65) As teachers and curriculum writers our goal is the give students those experiences, with the benefit of being as creative as we need to be, to help achieve the objective and teach them about the world. We truly do have great jobs!


Additional Resources:

Generating Curriculum and Instructional Innovations Through School-Based Management