The purpose of curriculum is to help students acquire basic, important information and skills. Curriculum also serves to make sense of the content by presenting content in a logical flow. It also acts as a guide to connect the knowledge from the classroom to students’ real life experiences at school and beyond.
Three roles are addressed in the article (Wiggins) that supports the purpose outlined above. In direct instruction, teachers help students acquire the basic knowledge and information. Using facilitation, teachers will help students to process information and make it meaningful for learners. In the role of coaching, teachers offer opportunities for students to apply the information and skills into more complex, new situations.
To directly answer the second question, in my case I have little control in designing the curriculum – it is handed down from the district. However, I have the flexibility to design assessment and learning activities for each lesson.
Teachers should have much more control of curriculum design. Again citing my experience, students would be better off if a suitable curriculum were designed for each class since each classroom’s condition is so different (grade level and foreign language abilities). I think it would be best if teachers identified their classroom and individual needs for learning which should be aligned with their curriculum. The design of the curriculum should be both reflexive and dynamic, having the capacity to adapt to student abilities. It should be more bottom-up, student driven instead of an inflexible, handed-down district developed curriculum. The unit design should be especially more flexible for teachers to create more effective units which build upon state and local standards as a foundation.
The curriculum I have is the same curriculum for all the elementary world language teachers in my district. No matter what language we teach, we must teach the same curriculum (e.g. who am I, what color is my hair, etc…). The current curriculum is designed by a group of our elementary world language teachers. It is very new group and is still in the experimental state. Ideally, the curriculum should support well the core content of the appropriate grade level. In other words, the foreign language content should complement the current learning for each grade. Students should easily be able to make a content connection.
The curriculum gives me content by unit. However, not enough content is given to support my daily lesson planning process. On the bright side, I have more space to control my lesson design. The curriculum gives focus questions for each theme, and “I can do” statements as objectives for each unit. These objectives are the outcomes I want students to achieve when I design my daily lessons. This gives flexibility for teachers to create their own unique daily lessons and corresponding activities. The downside to this approach is that it is very time consuming to create 100% of my daily teaching content and 100% of student resources. I don’t have a teacher’s edition of a text book that I can use as a guide, nor do the students have Chinese textbooks. In addition, I never know if my lesson plan and class activities will be effective.
I am concerned with my district’s top-down approach to foreign language curriculum. Foreign language is different than other subjects and Chinese is especially different with other languages. The curriculum does not address these differences in an effective way. Furthermore, the foreign language curriculum as a whole does not connect well with core units, which makes it more confusing for students and for me.
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Hello Cheng,
ReplyDeleteI applaud your efforts to support your curriculum with your own teacher-created resources. Lately, I have heard other teachers that are quite upset over their district's choice to purchase textbooks which do not cover the curriculum adequately. They too find themselves in a similiar position of locating materials and resources to work with. This seems like a horrible waste of funding. Flexibility and adaptability are true "teacher" qualities!
I think it is wonderful that we have a group of foreign language teachers in this class and it sounds like many of you have similar issues with either not having a curriculum or having one that does not quite fit (like Karim's analogy of the oversized suit). That said it does give you a great perspective from which to think about curriculum design and I agree your power lies in the flexibility that you have with your assessments and learning activities. I do like your thoughts about having more curricular connections at each grade level- this reminds me of some of the reading from last week.
ReplyDeleteYou have brought up a very good discussion topic, one that I would have never thought of being a teacher from a suburban, mostly all English speaking elementary school. It must be very difficult for foreign language teachers to follow the same strict curriculum guidelines. It sounds like you are working hard to do what is best for your students. Having to find your own resources sounds unreasonable when you are given such guides, is what frustrates me the most as a teacher. It sounds like working with an experimental curriculum would be an exciting way to develop new instruction!
ReplyDeleteCheng, I enjoyed reading your thoughts on curriculum. World Languages are unique and our district leaders tend to react to that with two extremes either providing no oversight or by trying to use the same structure that is used for core content areas. We have to become advocates for our students by communicating what they need to learn and how they best learn in to those in positions of oversight. It sounds like you are taking what is being handed down and making the best of it, Cheng!
ReplyDeleteRegarding textbooks, I would say that there are many good textbooks for Spanish, but like other content areas, good textbooks are not enough. They are a tool that must be supplemented with real life experiences and materials. In that way, you are a better teacher for creating resources that FIT your students and circumstances.
I can't imagine having to come up with my own resources. I do spend a lot of time finding supplemental materials than just the text and I have a smartboard this year that I have to design lessons for and that's enough! Hopefully it will get easier as the years go by and you can reuse some things!
ReplyDeleteI agree with Tonya too though about how texts can often be misleading. They are made for California and Texas who require the entire state to use the same texts. It isn't always what Ohio or Kentucky thinks is important. I spent a long time teaching how to count back change in third grade math because it was in the text just to find out that it isn't a standard in Kentucky. Designing your own curriculum from scratch based on the standards is hard work and time consuming but I am sure your students will learn best that way. Personally, I think you need to be paid twice as much for doing twice the work!!