Curriculum

How to Stay Up With the Curriculum by Rebecca Alber gives some wonderful guidance on what to do and what not to do regarding meeting curriculum goals. I work for a small, private school that is still working on creating a curriculum and aligning it with state standards. The teachers in my school do not have a schedule to follow, we make our own. Most classes have only one section so we don’t have team teachers to compare ourselves to when considering how we are progressing. We are very isolated. The GLCE’s (Grade Level Content Expectations) are our guiding force.

Alber suggests that many teachers focus only on completing the curriculum and not on the student learning that is taking place. Racing to the finish becomes more important. I can remember my first year of teaching a colleague said to me, “You should already be on the sixth story in the reading book, you better pick up the pace!” I sat down on the floor and cried. I was having fun teaching and doing some really great things with my students and was instantly deflated and feeling incompetent. I suddenly realized what was driving the teaching in that school, not learning but books. Most of Alber’s suggestions sound like the way that we were taught in college to plan, by setting goals and learning objectives and planning our lessons around them, not the other way around.

Alder, Rebecca (2010, November 2). How to stay up with the curriculum. Retrieved November 5, 2010 from http://www.edutopia.org/blog/curriculum-how-to-stay-caught-up-rebecca-alber?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EdutopiaNewContent+%28Edutopia%29&utm_content=Google+Reader.