This week we will be looking at the processes used in the establishment of learning goals, quality assessments, and marking schemes. Before we begin however, I'd like to take the opportunity to include a little disclaimer; my knowledge here has little experience to build off and my basis isn't exactly what I'd consider solid. The first steps to this long process of creation hinges on mythical "curriculum documents" that I have been assured exist somewhere. I have not actually seen them (or even their format), so I will be assuming that they are rather clear and concise. My readings for the course this blog is for have told me to refer to them on numerous occasions to "highlight key phrases" and the like, but never went much more in depth than that. So, Internet, we'll go forward and pretend we can follow these vague initial steps.
After looking for these key ideas in our curriculum documents, the general idea is to work backwards from broad concepts to the specific. The first step is to pick a topic which must be deduced from curriculum documents. My readings tell me, "if you know the curriculum well, you will have good ideas," so I can only assume that since we don't know the curriculum at all, we will currently have bad ideas. Regardless, once we have our topic, the next step is to further deconstruct said curriculum document and group similar concepts and ideas together. Keeping a broad context in mind (like how this lesson will fit in with the students yearly goals) is important at this stage, so it can be helpful to examine learning goals for both younger and older grade levels for comparison. I find these instructions rather specific, but I believe the steps must be malleable, as I have heard curriculum documents differ from province to province.
Once our deductions are clustered into neat, little packages, we must then organize them to find out what our students must eventually Know, be able to Do, and Be (a less important aspects, one that some provinces omit entirely). With these ideas established, overarching concepts and enduring questions will be more easily identifiable. We must then keep these new concepts at the forefront of the lessons in order to guide students towards the desired learning objective. After this, we must simply become more and more specific. Next is to decide the style/number of projects, and finally, daily lessons that will help students reach a point intellectually where completion of the projects are feasible.
Now the entire time I read these steps I could not get over how robotic they sounded. Sure, the conclusion to my reading stated that, while the process was presented linearly, in the real world it is hardly ever like that, but my question is why should I learn it in such a specific, linear manner. Everything I've learned about teaching a class until this point has told me to include students in the planning process; to make them a part of their own learning. Now, suddenly, I'm told how to create these extremely traditional units. All my professors preach constructivism as the method of the future, but it shocks me how few actually practice it. If constructivist methods are so much better than traditional ones, then those methods should start in teacher education. Instead, I get a one off sentence saying "some teachers like to include their students in the creation of rubrics." That's fantastic for some teachers, but that doesn't help me at all. How about learning how to include students?
The specific, linear method of designing curriculum and assessment is great and all, but I feel it will rarely apply to the classroom. I feel I would be much better off looking at these curriculum documents firsthand and working through how to create this lesson plans instead of vague descriptions based on documents I have never seen. My rant got a little out of hand towards the end their, but it needed to be said. This time I'll leave you with a piece by Heironymus Bosch, the man who painted the surreal before it was cool. The title, A Violent Forcing of the Frog, makes about as much sense as this piece does, but it definitely reflects how I feel after my little rant.
Until next time, Internet,
cjarvis
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A Violent Forcing of the Frog
Heironymus Bosch
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