I was explaining how my first grade team does lesson planning for literacy. We use our combined knowledge and experience of 16 years to choose the best lessons to meet the objectives to meet the standards. We have brain access (and real access) to so many literacy curricula and resources.
And I was told: (the following is paraphrased)”Well, other teachers in other grade levels also have experience. And they think they are making the best lessons. If our kids aren’t achieving as much as they should be, then we really aren’t doing our best. How do we know that your experiences and knowledge are rigorous?”
So her solution is to buy a scripted curriculum. That of course doesn’t have to be used as scripted. But nonetheless is presented as the magic bullet for teacher’s experiences and knowledge that might not be rigorous.
Here is my “in retrospect response:”
Teachers are always doing our best. To expect more than our best is to expect godliness. And depending on the day or the year in our teaching career, our best might not be the best for a student. But we are human. And we can only reach our potential at that moment in time. But we teachers are also reflective and ambitious. We work hard to grow professionally and help our students develop and achieve their goals- the paths to achievement looking different for different students. Teaching, like other professions, has a learning curve. And for students’ sakes, I hope there isn’t a peak. So maybe it’s not a learning curve. It’s a learning line. I believe that good teachers have a learning line, an x=y line. With more knowledge and more experience we get better. Know more ways to help kids access and construct knowledge.
Professor Culbert recently wrote in The New York Times Room For Debate that “The way to make stars out of teachers is to let teachers be stars, to let them be as innovative as they can be, to let them find the path that works best for them and their students. If they are allowed to search for the best answers, they’ll find them.”
That seems quite the opposite of the “let’s buy a scripted curriculum” solution. And yet the “let’s buy a scripted curriculum” seems to be the silver bullet for student achievement.
Why?
I was at the Conference for Teaching and Learning sponsored by WNET a few weekends ago. Elizabeth Demarest spoke about how the “concept of achievement should drive assessment.” And yet currently assessment is driving our concept of achievement. Curricula are bought because they are proven to raise test scores, the current concept of achievement. In a few years another reading or writing curriculum will come out revised, and considered more rigorous. Or more likely another standardized test will come out also more rigorous. Wait. That sounds an awful lot like teaching. Improved with time. Rigor is not standard. And neither is the concept of achievement. There is certainly a standard or a bar to maintain and the common core standards address that.
But, personally I am offended when an external curriculum is automatically considered more rigorous than my team’s 16 years (and growing!) of knowledge and skill and exposure to many of these curricula.
And many times these curricula are bought to address the reality of high teacher turnover. To give beginning teachers some thing to work with rather than re-inventing the wheel. And believe me. No teacher likes to reinvent the wheel. We love to steal great ideas and mold them in a way that they work in our classrooms, sometimes looking differently with different groups of students. Can you only imagine the power of the ideas and activities of these curricula in the hands of experienced teachers?
So-sure. Buy the curriculum. Let it be a tool that me and my colleagues mold to help our students achieve (in all the different ways they do so.) But recognize that you are not eliminating a learning curve. That you are not jumping to a “peak.” That you are not buying a silver bullet.
A Must Read:
Culbert’s opinion on The New York Times Room for Debate
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/03/27/how-to-raise-the-status-of-teachers/give-teachers-autonomy
