I wonder....how can the three things all be mentioned in the same sentence? For starters, as mentioned in both the UBD and SBD readings, in order for one to design curriculum, you have to start with a desired end result first. All too often though, we see that teachers, particularly some of my closest colleagues, often just push through the material so that they have covered it and can say that they are adhering to the curriculum. Teachers like this aren't concerned with the end result...the big picture, which says "do the students understand the material that is being covered in class?" Instead, these "coverage" teachers push through the material without ever really coming up with a genuine form of assessing their student's understanding of the material because they are too concerned with keeping up with the curriculum and staying aligned with their time schedule.
I loathe these types of teachers, and I can see that the kids do too. My one colleague who teaches the same exact thing as me is "way ahead" of me according to the curriculum because all he does is simply take out the textbook, read aloud, and then pass out dittos. Where is the creativity in that? Where is the engagement in the material that you are covering? With history (my content field) the kids won't care anything about the material that you are covereing unless you can somehow relate it to today or to their lives. Although I often admit that this is difficult to do all the time, it certainly doesn't mean that this path of teaching should be avoided at all costs as this one particular colleague of mine seems to do. For him, the curriculum drives him to teach a certain way. For me, it's more of a guide. My curriculum was last updated in 1999, so its needless to say that it is outdated. Sure there are some good ideas in there, but there are also many things that I myself have just completely scrapped because they are outdated. Kids today are constantly changing, and the way that they understand things and can relate to things around them is also changing as well. Therefore, we need to always constantly adapt and update our teaching methods and the way that we implement the curriculum in our classrooms in order to keep up with the kids and give them any sense of justice about how they are going to be educated.
Shifting gears for just a minute, my one thought about the UBD template is that it is nice, but it also looks incredibly time consuming. I've got a million and one things going on in a single day, night, weekend etc., and I really would like to bring into question just how long a process such as this one would truly take. I agree in utilizing the technique of "working backwards" and starting off witih identifying a desired result first. Each day when I figure out my lesson plan, it is my learning objectives and how I am going to get my students to reach and accomplish these goals that I have set up for them that drives me to focus on how I will conduct that particular lesson on that day. I also like using the concept of essential questions. Whenever I start a new unit, I always put a few questions up on the board that by the time we reach the end of the unit, we will have come to answer. When we finish the unit, we revisit the questions.
My final thought will go towards politics and education. I'm a firm believer that the political involvement in the field of education has come to handicap us as educators, and has turned our students into robots. I do think that it is important to assess the students' knowledge and skills in reading and writing, but let their teachers, the ones that are in the trenches with them everyday do this, not some "suit" up on capitol hill, or someone or works for the department of education that may have never sniffed the inside of a classroom. I don't go into their office and tell them how to do their job, and so, they shouldn't do the same to me and my students. Likewise, those who design the curriculum should be the very ones who get to implement it in their classroom. If I have no stake in what I am teaching because I did not have a hand in the process of designing it, then whose to that I even know how to implement it properly, or that I even care to do it the way that it was designed for me to do? The system is backwards, and has been for quite some time. As I say to my students all the time, how many things in life are multiple choice? My retort back to them is that only the dollar menu as McDonalds is, which is why I never use any sort of multiple choice questions on any of my assessments. Ironically, our standarized tests do! Go figure.
1 comment:
I completely agree with you about the lack of creativity by these "coverage" teachers. How do the students retain any information if they are being treated as robots? In our ever changing world and society students are expected to stay static. I can also relate to the type of teachers you mention. In my first year as a teacher, eager to teach and be creative, my mentor basically told me I had no room for creativity. He told me I must keep on moving through the text, even when students did not understand. Fortunately, I come from a family of educators (father and brother are principals, sister and sister-in-law are teachers)who told me to listen to my heart and do what I felt was in the best interest of the students. He may have been farther in the book, but my students were engaged in learning.
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