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.
I'm in my 15 year of teaching either Spanish or English, and curriculum always seems like it's "blending" together. I have written a Spanish curriculum no less than 3 times over these years because State mandates have asked teachers to do something different. I'm writing my curriculum once again for the new schools I teach at. I'm hoping to gain the skills in this class to write a document that will stand the tests of time and not need to be adapted when the DOE changes it's demands.
ReplyDeleteAn excellent point...without a great deal of "formal" curriculum development training, you have a ton of experience already. And most importantly...you plan, revise, improve, and think about your curriculum every single day (and get a chance to try it out with your students).
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