What is the purpose of curriculum and what role do we have as teachers in this purpose?
The purpose of curriculum is to make sure that all students are learning what they need to. Curriculum gives us an outline of what we as teachers need to complete and teach before the end of the school year. As teachers we have the role to take the curriculum and come up with some good activities and lessons to go along with the content. We have to make sure that we come up with lessons and activities that will help embed the content into the students brains. You need to make sure to have things that connect to real life and the students understand why they need to learn it.
How much control do we have in the designing of curriculum? How much should we have?
I think the teachers should have some control in the designing of the curriculum. Of course, we don't have any control on the core content is that we have to teach but we can have a say in how it is designed. I have the opportunity to this over the summer. Our district wasn't happy with our writing curriculum. The decided to work this summer to come up with a new curriculum. I along with others, spent at least 6 days working on forming this. It is still a working document and we will look at it again this coming summer. The committee has at least one member per grade for elementary grades, and a few people from the middle school and high school. I think allowing the teachers some control, it makes it more useful for us and we know more about how we want things taught.
How does curriculum that you have look like in your classrooms in a day to day environment?
The curriculum in my classroom has a bit of each article in it. I spend a lot of time trying to integrate as much as possible. I think it is the best way to help with making real life connections...and it makes you sane not trying to cram in all the content for each specific subject. I also use the backwards design. My school had 2 days of PD this summer on assessment. It was really focused on self-assessment and using the backward design. It is most beneficial if you come up with your final assessment first. This way, you make sure all the content will be covered in the assessment. You can then take the assessment and break it down into many different lessons. This makes sure you are covering all content.
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Working with collegues to come up with assessments is a plus to working in a district, or even a large school. I am the only second grade teacher in my school so I'm really all on my own. I miss having other teachers at the same grade level to bounce ideas off of. When I taught kindergarten, there were three of us that each developed a different science unit that we all rotated and shared. The idea of common assessments really interests me. After 624 opened my eyes a bit, I've been using the backward design so far this year and I really think I'll see a difference in their achievement. I enjoyed reading your post!
ReplyDeleteYou are the second post today that mentions the backwards design and the tie to assessment. I think that this is a really good point that I wish I was going to cover more but perhaps like Karen mentioned you might have gotten that in another class- if so great! I love the idea of the backwards design and thinking about assessment first and then working in that direction when considering instruction. I do see it as a more fluid process with curriculum, assessment and instruction influencing each other simultaneously.
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