Cycle Five: What consitutes a successful curriculum?

Every few years, it seems, we are privy to new insights in the way of educational reform, all intended to make students succeed through a better curriculum. It seems like they are like the saying about the weather in Michigan, “wait 5 minutes and it will change”. I think our readings for this cycle show ways in which we can make education better: focusing on a students’ as individuals (what makes them happy?), changing ideas about assessment, increasing teacher collaboration, and working to lessen variables outside of class.

Having had the unfortunate opportunity of being required to teach to a test, I am a firm believer that standardized tests are not the way to measure how successful a curriculum, program, or school operates. When we fill a child’s head full of information and then teach that child how to do well on tests, we are not preparing them for life, but rather to be excellent Trivial Pursuit players. Tests are not a good indicator of whether a child has mastered material, but rather how much of the jargon they are able to retain long enough to spit it out on paper. As Eisner points out, “The result is an approach to reform that leaves little room for surprise, for imagination, for improvisation, or for the cultivation of productive idiosyncrasy,” (329). He also points out that the education of the past and the education of the present are not the same. “Education has evolved from a form of human development serving personal and civic needs into a product our nation produces to compete in a global economy,” (330). We are mass-producing laborers instead of educating humans.

When we place pressure on our students to do well on a test, and place their futures on that test, we are placing them under pressure that “undermines the kind of experience that students out to have in schools,” (Eisner, 330). Each year, Chinese students commit suicide after they receive failing grades on the gaokao (the Chinese National College Entrance Exam). In the United States, high-stakes testing can cause severe emotional or physical distress on students while not producing the desired effect of improvement in student learning.

So how do we do assessment better? At CPESS the portfolios the students complete, as well as presentations they make, “are the primary record-transcript- of a student’s success at CPESS and the basis for receiving the diploma.” (Meier 60). At Tutor Time, we do something similar. Children have a file that follows them through their time at the center from enrollment to kindergarten. These files contain ability profiles (what they should be accomplishing for their age range), but also examples of art, mathematics, early literacy, musical, and physical education. Pictures and anecdotal reports indicate what a child enjoys and what he or she is learning.

I have incorporated several of Eisner’s suggested assessments in my year at Calvert. One question Eisner asked is “Do students participate in the assessment of their own work? If so, how? It is important for teachers to understand what students themselves think of their own work,” (332). My Honor’s Earth Science students were in charge of teaching their classmates an overview of a chapter in the book we did not have time to cover at length in class. At the end of their teaching, I had the students evaluate themselves as both teachers and students (as their peers taught), based on a rubric I passed out and explained at the beginning of the project. I also had them give me a rationalization for giving themselves that grade. Most students had trouble separating themselves from being the graded to the grader. They were so used to having someone tell them what was acceptable and unacceptable that they couldn’t think for themselves. Do they give themselves a great grade because they want to increase their GPA, or are they honest with (or even hard on) themselves because they know they could do better?

Another one of Eisner’s suggested assessments that I have used involved questions. “Perhaps we should be less concerned with whether they [students] can answer our questions than with whether they can ask their own,” (331). I have always thought that in order to be a good learner, a student has to be a good thinker. I was fortunate to learn under a master teacher during my undergrad and she was an expert at questioning. During our tests, she would have us write and answer our own questions. In the beginning, it could be something as simple as true and false or fill-in-the-blank, but as the semester progressed she made us write more challenging questions, eventually writing an entire test based on the questions we had asked.

“What if we took the idea seriously and concluded units of study by looking for the sorts of questions that youngsters were able to raise as a result of being immersed in a domain of study?” (331). I tried this with my Earth Science students and got mixed results. As with grading themselves, some students were completely baffled at this and chose not to answer (or ask) any questions. Others chose to show less than I know they knew, while still others excelled at thinking outside of the norm. We continued to work on asking questions and opening a dialogue about topics covered in class. If both questioning and self-evaluation had been taught at an earlier age, these students would have flourished with these assessment tools. The preschoolers I am currently working with are always asking questions and learning to find the answers in those.

One common theme between Eisner, Noddings, and Meier is the idea of personalized or individual interest curriculum. At Meier’s school, Central Park East Secondary School (CPESS), students in the Senior Institute complete 14 portfolios of the student’s choosing and take ownership over the material. Eisner tells us “we should be trying to discover where a youngster is, where his or her strengths are, where additional work is warranted,” (330). Noddings suggests that while we are promoting certain goals in schooling, we are neglecting education that is personal and that brings happiness in occupation. That by grouping all students together to take the same classes, we are not benefiting those who want to learn, nor are we changing the minds of those who see a career and not schooling in their futures.

Differentiated education has become a hot-topic over the last decade as schools, textbook makers, and society at large are seeing the need to treat individuals as individuals. I have had a few successful experiences in this area. In teaching Earth Science, I assigned a project as a means of review. The students were given a rubric of things that needed to be included, but the means of presentation was their choice. I was impressed with the projects I got back: only one was a traditional essay; others included books, dioramas, poems, stories, songs, and a play. As each person presented, students were able to review the material in new and interesting ways. As a preschool teacher, what we call “explorative play” could also be considered differentiated instruction as children chose activities and areas to explore on their own or with a teacher as “fellow learner”.

Both Eisner and Meier also address the idea of teachers working together. Eisner believes that a deep problem of schooling is that teachers “don’t often have access to other people who know what they’re doing when they teach and who can help them to do it better,” (329). Meier’s school helped to remedy this by allowing teachers time to collaborate on lesson plans and on strategies to help students.

Teacher collaboration is beneficial to both the schools and the teachers. For students, teacher collaboration provides consistency, best practices, and the knowledge base from many teachers. For the educator, collaborative efforts breaks the isolation teachers may feel, and brings daily satisfaction that results from ensuring students learn and a job well done. Collaboration can vary and may involve giving feedback on a lesson, discussions on student assessments, and analyzing student data.

I was very fortunate in my year at Calvert to have a number of colleagues who I could go to for mentoring as a new teacher. The school district itself provided mentors for all new teachers who had all been teaching for ten or more years and who met with us at least once a month to answer and ask questions about our first years. Additionally, a fellow new teacher and I sought out an experienced teacher in our department who had been teaching for more than ten years and who helped us get established by showing us practices that had worked in the past and helping us handle hard situations. She was very generous with her materials and time. The biggest help, though, was the relationship I had formed with another new teacher in my department. We planned together, shared materials, and just dialogued at the end of the day/week/lesson/unit about things that had gone well and things we should change for next time. These interactions with people who knew what I was going through or who were going through it at the same time helped to establish me as a teacher.

We are all aware that students come to class with whatever baggage that brought with them from outside of school. Providing for physical needs is something they did extremely well at the charter schools in the New York Times article. Families who lived in the zone the school covered had access to after-school programs, asthma care, pre- college advice and note taking skills, and adult classes for expectant parents “The organization has placed young teaching assistants, known as peacemakers, in many of the elementary school classrooms in the area and poured money into organizing block associations, helping tenants buy buildings from the city, and refurbishing parks and playgrounds. By linking services, the program aims to improve on early-childhood programs like Head Start, whose impact has been shown to evaporate as children age.” (1). The flexible schedule and small size at CPESS allowed staff to take the time to teach students caring and compassion so they were able to express it in times of extreme unrest, caring for their emotional needs as well. Noddings discusses the social aspect of education, “If the am is justice-to provide all students with an education that will meet their needs- the solutions is likely to involve the provision of considerable variety in school offerings and to include material that might contribute to personal as well as public life,” (432). He advocates rigorous and interesting course that center on a students talents and interest in order to demonstrate a society that honors all honest workers, not just those with degrees and lots of money.

So, to answer the question of the week “what constitutes a successful curriculum?” I would say that the answer is: work and effort. It involves teachers working together to encourage their students in areas of interest to be critical thinkers and to take responsibility for their education. This is far more complicated than pulling out cookie-cutter lesson plans from years past and calling them “what works”. We are not training professional students and the idea of doing well on a standardized test is not what will make them excel in life (which should be our ultimate goal as educators). Education is always evolving, and so should our curriculum.