Week 3

The articles about education in other countries have been very eye-opening for me.  The system in Finland sounds particularly excellent.  At the high school level, we do not have parent teacher conferences, unless one is called for a student who's in trouble.  I love the idea of it being required for every parent to meet with his/her child's teacher once a semester to discuss gains and areas of improvements.  This increased communication between parents and teachers must be incredibly beneficial to the students.

I was also very taken with how their assessments differ from ours.  I like that the emphasis is on synthesis, not regurgitating facts on a bubble sheet (wretched bubble sheets!).  I would love to see more open-ended assessments make their way into our classrooms. 

In Curriculum 21, Jacobs talks about the global community and how our students need to have the skills and knowledge to connect with people around the world.  For my students, I feel this is quite a challenge because their world view is very limited.  Cultural literacy is something I try to work on with them, but most students do not watch the news or read the newspaper.  This makes it difficult to prepare them for the nuances of the global community; political allies, religious conflicts, etc.  are something they are not very familiar with.  In fact, most of my 9th graders cannot recite basics about American history, let alone the structures of other countries (Didn't Martin Luther King, Jr. end slavery?  True question from a college prep class last week!).

In addition, most of my students only take 1 year of a foreign language, if at all.  Foreign language is no longer a credit requirement at my school, so it tends to fall by the wayside.  With all of these elements combined, I have to get pretty creative in tying my lessons into a global community.  My skills are not anywhere near perfected with this. : )

Blogs I'm Following

Here are the web addresses of the two blogs I'll be looking at this semester:

http://jimburke.typepad.com/

http://blog.readingapprenticeship.org/

Definition of Curriculum

What is curriculum?  To be honest, I feel rather unqualified to voice my own definition yet--I feel as though I have so much to learn!  But in general, I think a curriculum is a structured plan used to pass knowledge and skills onto students.  In essence, I view curriculum as a blueprint with an end result: student acquisition of skills and/or knowledge base.  I think that some curricula are more structured that others, but the end result (should be) the improved knowledge of students. 

My experience with curriculum planning and development

During my second year (first year?  It's all blending together!) of teaching, my extremely limited curriculum skills were put to the ultimate test: accreditation!  Somehow, I managed to survive the experience intact, but it made me realize how much I had to learn about curriculum design and implementation.  At my school, we regularly review different aspects of our curriculum and frequently update/revise our common assessments.  In the last five years, I have been a part of a variety of committees relating to curriculum: information skills literacy, grammar, British literature survey, Reading Apprenticeship, American poetry...to name a few.  Oftentimes, these meetings leave my head spinning with the complexities of adapting a curriculum to different teachers and different students.

In my own classroom, I work hard to continuously revise units and lesson to keep students engaged (as much as possible!) and information fresh.  While I have no official training in curriculum development, I feel as though I do it all the time in my own classroom. I think I do a pretty good job overall, but I could definitely use this course to prepare for our department's curriculum  review (sometime in the future) and to hone my skills for my own classes.

My first attempt at blogging!

Just trying to see how this will look...I'll actually post something worth reading later. : )