Project work is but one aspect of teaching at the Charter, and yet, at some point of the year, it appears to take over everything else. At least that's what's happening in our 2nd/3rd grade class.
At the beginning of the year, teachers are engaging the children in a variety of experiences, often directly related to the natural world and/or artistic materials and/or community issues ... it's very open-ended, it seems. At some point, teachers begin to identify potentials for project work and continue homing in on a topic by providing experiences and provocations that directly respond to children's observations of prior experiences. It is very much in the spirit of the "ball toss" metaphor that Reggio offers - teachers and students collaborate in the emergence of curriculum.
In our classroom, it is all about BUGS. Bugs are everywhere - dead ones, live ones, small ones, bugs with wings, bugs with shed skin, bugs with more legs than one can count, bugs that lay eggs, bugs that hatch from those eggs, bugs from home, bugs from the school meadow, bugs that other classes bring to us ... BUGS!
In response to a lot of dramatic play around bugs, the teacher of the class decided to engage the children in a game of writing a play about their bugs. One morning, out of nowhere, there appeared a green box on her desk, titled: "How to Make a Play". We were stunned! It was as if the game was made just for the class.
It was, of course. As the teacher began to explain the game to the children, I was remembering our conversation earlier about what parameters to put on the game to make sure it had enough structure and enough provocation for creativity.
Slowly, but surely, I am seeing what this ball toss implies for the teacher... I am seeing how playful, open-ended, and almost celebratory this project work time is, and yet, how deeply it reaches into children's thinking:
If there were no bugs, the earth might not survive.
Don't step on bugs, because they're living creatures like you. We're both living creatures.
Bugs are us, we are bugs - What we do to the bugs affects us, too.
To contract this open-ended session, the teacher went on, after the game (which was part of "Project Work" on the schedule) to begin Reading with a mini-lesson on inferences, based on a folktale about a bug. A few days later, in the midst of a poetry unit in Writing, a poem about stink bugs emerges on the easel. Project work is everywhere!
What did John Muir say? Something along the lines of: Tug on anything, and you will find it is connected to everything else. So, also, is the network of learning.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Changing Educational Paradigms
This is one of those videos / lectures that you need to listen to more than once. You need to listen to it twice, three times, four times, maybe even five times before you really comprehend what the speaker is trying to get across to you. This is the kind of talk that goes much further than "a good idea" and reaches much deeper than "oh, that's just what I would say." At least for me, watching Ken Robinson's TED talk on Changing Educational Paradigms - for the fifth time, now - shook something inside me so hard, that something I hadn't really noticed for a long time came out.
This talk is about changing educational paradigms, which means changing our ideas about why and how we learn, and, therefore, why and how we teach. It traces the origins of our current educational system to intellectual and economic eras that are long-gone and, while a significant part of our history, in great need of updating to today's realities.
What is so significant about this talk for me is that it reminds me there is still a piece of that old paradigm inside me. Watching RSAnimate's superb illustration of the ideas Ken Robinson presents, I remember instances of that paradigm in action from my own schooling experience. I remember how academic knowledge was what made me smart, and how learning was divided into separate disciplines with separate departments of teachers. I remember the expectation that I would get good grades, so that I could go to a good college, so that I could ... what, exactly?
This is not to say that I regret my education - I was extremely lucky to have insightful teachers and supportive parents. I enjoyed my classes, because I enjoyed learning, just by itself, so it was no great struggle for me to get the good grades I wanted. And I went to a good college because I wanted to explore the academic community further, to meet scholars, and, perhaps, become one, myself. But it has taken this long - 10 years after graduating from my schooling - to realize that the journey of my education was never for the sake of my "achievement" - that is, an external evaluation of my learning - but for the sake of my learning as I would evaluate it.
Even in the midst of my internship at the Charter, I can feel a heartbeat of that old paradigm, asking me what I'm going to have to show for myself at the end of this, and whether I'm really doing what's expected. The biggest gift the Charter community has offered me is a kind of Get Out of Jail Free card, which allows me not to think as much about those questions, and more about the deeper questions that drive my learning forward. By staying true to myself as a learner, I will naturally come to whatever it is I'll have to show for myself at the end, because it will have come from me, and it will mean something to me.
It is no easy task to battle this old paradigm within me. It's actually pretty painful to think that I might very well have to kill it at some point: kill it, bury it, mourn it, and then - and only then - truly and completely embark into a new paradigm. But how do I kill something that is a part of who I am, and that is a part of my story? That is what is so painful for me, so painful about any paradigm shift. No wonder such shifts have rarely passed without bloodshed. And don't think there aren't real and formidable tensions in the world of education between paradigms.
I just never thought there could be such violence inside myself at the same time.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Currere mappa?
As I continue thinking about curriculum mapping (CM) this week, I'm wondering about the analogies and metaphors used to define and explore CM, what do the etymologies of the words "curriculum" and "map" offer to our understanding of the concept of curriculum mapping?
Whenever I want to get inside the meaning of a word, I always go back to its origins. Often, the richest metaphors of meaning come from the words, from which today's language is originally derived. So, here we go.
From www.etymonline.com:
CURRICULUM
from Modern Latin transferred use of classical Latin curriculum "a running, course, career" (also "a fast chariot, racing car"), from currere "to run, move quickly" (same origins as current)
MAP
shortening of Middle English mapemounde "map of the world" (late 14c.), from Medieval Latin mappa mundi "map of the world," first element from Latin mappa "napkin, cloth" (on which maps were drawn). The verb map is first attested 1580s; "to put (something) on the map".
It's fascinating to consider these two etymologies, especially when one considers them together. When people think of curriculum, yes, we think of a course, but a course of study. The idea of a race course, reminds me of the time crunch so many teachers feel when trying to fit a course of study into a 9-month school year. But it also makes me wonder if we can understand a fast-moving course of study as the journey that we take as a classroom community, no matter what the content. I feel like we forget that it's not the content of curriculum that is moving through the year - we are. We're the ones moving through the experiences of life, constructing an understanding of the world as we interact with each other, with text, and with our observations. This is, indeed, a fast-moving process, hard to capture in the moment, and yet, perhaps the very essence of our schooling experience.
How fitting, then, that map comes from the cloth, on which our geographical understanding of the world was recorded and depicted. The first maps were not constructed with the purpose of determining what course of travel was to be taken, but to record the courses of discovery that had already been taken. Lewis and Clark, for example, mapped their route and their surroundings as they went, because they had no idea what the Louisiana Territory held. I wonder if teachers can consider themselves in a similar position: instead of mapping a route through known territory, mapping what they notice and encounter in places they haven't been before.
Combined, the origins of curriculum mapping might be currere mappa. To run on a cloth. Hmm, not entirely satisfying. But what if we thought of it as a clue to humans' early cognizance of representing one's journey to the world? What if "running on a cloth" meant reflecting on our journey by abstractly - symbolically - watching ourselves run the course of our lives in a way that allows us to make sense of where we're running to, where we're running from, and what surroundings we interact with in the process? All of this seems to support the idea that curriculum mapping is not the mapping of a journey-to-be, but of a journey as it continues to unfold, day by day, experience by experience.
Whenever I want to get inside the meaning of a word, I always go back to its origins. Often, the richest metaphors of meaning come from the words, from which today's language is originally derived. So, here we go.
From www.etymonline.com:
CURRICULUM
from Modern Latin transferred use of classical Latin curriculum "a running, course, career" (also "a fast chariot, racing car"), from currere "to run, move quickly" (same origins as current)
MAP
shortening of Middle English mapemounde "map of the world" (late 14c.), from Medieval Latin mappa mundi "map of the world," first element from Latin mappa "napkin, cloth" (on which maps were drawn). The verb map is first attested 1580s; "to put (something) on the map".
It's fascinating to consider these two etymologies, especially when one considers them together. When people think of curriculum, yes, we think of a course, but a course of study. The idea of a race course, reminds me of the time crunch so many teachers feel when trying to fit a course of study into a 9-month school year. But it also makes me wonder if we can understand a fast-moving course of study as the journey that we take as a classroom community, no matter what the content. I feel like we forget that it's not the content of curriculum that is moving through the year - we are. We're the ones moving through the experiences of life, constructing an understanding of the world as we interact with each other, with text, and with our observations. This is, indeed, a fast-moving process, hard to capture in the moment, and yet, perhaps the very essence of our schooling experience.
How fitting, then, that map comes from the cloth, on which our geographical understanding of the world was recorded and depicted. The first maps were not constructed with the purpose of determining what course of travel was to be taken, but to record the courses of discovery that had already been taken. Lewis and Clark, for example, mapped their route and their surroundings as they went, because they had no idea what the Louisiana Territory held. I wonder if teachers can consider themselves in a similar position: instead of mapping a route through known territory, mapping what they notice and encounter in places they haven't been before.
Combined, the origins of curriculum mapping might be currere mappa. To run on a cloth. Hmm, not entirely satisfying. But what if we thought of it as a clue to humans' early cognizance of representing one's journey to the world? What if "running on a cloth" meant reflecting on our journey by abstractly - symbolically - watching ourselves run the course of our lives in a way that allows us to make sense of where we're running to, where we're running from, and what surroundings we interact with in the process? All of this seems to support the idea that curriculum mapping is not the mapping of a journey-to-be, but of a journey as it continues to unfold, day by day, experience by experience.
Monday, February 7, 2011
Curriculum mapping: Responses
Curriculum mapping (CM) is, as you see in my last post, a very complex process of thinking and communicating. Between comparisons to tool belts and medical meetings, it also varies greatly in interpretation once implemented. So I have to ask myself at this point - what do I think of it? What do my colleagues at the Charter think? What does CM really mean for the practice of teaching?
Let me start, perhaps, with the analogies. The first one in Getting Results compares CM to a tool belt that the teacher wears, armed with the hammer of content that nails in the necessary standards with drilling questions and screwdrivers that (how?) turn content into knowledge. I have to be upfront and say I'm not at all enamored by this comparison. To me, this image only maintains traditional notions of knowledge as external from students' bodies and minds, and of curriculum as an objective on the part of the teacher to get as much knowledge from the outside into the students. Apparently with drills and screwdrivers. That sounds worse than the dentist to me.
Jacobs' comparison to medical care is a bit more intriguing to me. (I have two parents in health care who always wonder at how, of the four children between them, none has come close to going into health care. I've realized over time that, as an educator, I may have come the closest.) In schools, as in the world of medicine, "decisions must be made among the actual people who are going to attend to the patient's [student's] needs." She present CM as a hub for cumulative decision making among teachers, demanding a reorganization of teacher meetings around what students need to successfully navigate and reach each benchmark along the way to fulfilling learning standards. I can go further with this analogy, but am left wondering: I can see how such demands of CM can help re-focus teachers on the fact that they teach children before curriculum, but I don't see how CM is making it possible for the day-to-day curriculum to serve and engage the children more directly in their learning.
I think this is a crucial break point between the Charter and other public schools, as far as I can tell. CM may help teachers re-think what and how they are teaching, but it seems to be primarily a tool for a learning community of teachers, not for collaborative learning among teachers and their students.
When we met today at the Charter with Louise to discuss our impressions of CM, our own analogies emerged, gradually wrapping closer and closer around an examination of what purpose maps have in the context of a classroom.
I feel the need to check in with myself about how project questions are evolving. I'm looking for some kind of binder, for example, or some way of organizing how a project evolves.
But the map is not there to prevent us from getting lost. Getting lost is an important part of the process.
Maybe it's not getting lost, but being alive and creative and immersed in what's going on in the classroom.
But I feel the need for something that helps name what you're doing, so that you're understanding it as you're living it.
If we think of it like hiking, the map is the thing we use to keep from getting lost, but when you have that third thing - the magic of emergent curriculum in the moment - you feel you can take the risk of the path that is not on the map.
But there are two kinds of "lost" - there's getting lost in wonder and challenge, and there's also an unproductive lost.
Within this analogy, I began wondering whether mapping is an activity in which we plan curriculum from a preconceived guide - like planning a hiking route according to a map of the area - or as the process of making the map for a piece of uncharted terrain. The question is, then, who is making the map?
As the session continued, I began to realize that the greatest challenge CM faces us with at the Charter is that it is an idea that was conceptualized in a paradigm - the paradigm - that we are trying to move away from. However, in this challenge lies its greatest potential: as one of my colleagues commented:
I feel like, in the work that we are doing, because we represent a paradigm shift in our fundamental ideas about education, we are mapping in this new paradigm, moving from the concept of external knowledge to internal knowledge - once we shift our concept of knowledge, we shift everything else, including planning, assessment, etc. We have to bring people all the way there, including ourselves.
I left our day together with Louise re-grounded, to continue the analogy, in the terrain I find myself on here at the Charter. I have to believe that, because we are mapping within a new paradigm, we are, indeed, the map-makers of our curricula; indeed, we are re-imagining what curriculum can be. Yet, even though I would never have imagined taking on such a task, I know I am not alone. All of us here are making our maps - sometimes with each other, mostly with our students, and always in a communal sense of adventure across the school.
Finally, I wonder if we didn't begin to uncover one of the secrets of this new paradigm today. My colleague above described "moving form the concept of external knowledge to internal knowledge", which relates back to my lack of satisfaction with the analogy of the tool belt. If we choose to take on curriculum mapping in an educational paradigm, in which knowledge comes first from within the individual, and grows through experience with the world and exchange in community, then our first lesson seems to be this: Not only are we the map-makers, notating our observations of unknown ground, we - with our students - are imagining the terrain into being to begin with.
Let me start, perhaps, with the analogies. The first one in Getting Results compares CM to a tool belt that the teacher wears, armed with the hammer of content that nails in the necessary standards with drilling questions and screwdrivers that (how?) turn content into knowledge. I have to be upfront and say I'm not at all enamored by this comparison. To me, this image only maintains traditional notions of knowledge as external from students' bodies and minds, and of curriculum as an objective on the part of the teacher to get as much knowledge from the outside into the students. Apparently with drills and screwdrivers. That sounds worse than the dentist to me.
Jacobs' comparison to medical care is a bit more intriguing to me. (I have two parents in health care who always wonder at how, of the four children between them, none has come close to going into health care. I've realized over time that, as an educator, I may have come the closest.) In schools, as in the world of medicine, "decisions must be made among the actual people who are going to attend to the patient's [student's] needs." She present CM as a hub for cumulative decision making among teachers, demanding a reorganization of teacher meetings around what students need to successfully navigate and reach each benchmark along the way to fulfilling learning standards. I can go further with this analogy, but am left wondering: I can see how such demands of CM can help re-focus teachers on the fact that they teach children before curriculum, but I don't see how CM is making it possible for the day-to-day curriculum to serve and engage the children more directly in their learning.
I think this is a crucial break point between the Charter and other public schools, as far as I can tell. CM may help teachers re-think what and how they are teaching, but it seems to be primarily a tool for a learning community of teachers, not for collaborative learning among teachers and their students.
When we met today at the Charter with Louise to discuss our impressions of CM, our own analogies emerged, gradually wrapping closer and closer around an examination of what purpose maps have in the context of a classroom.
I feel the need to check in with myself about how project questions are evolving. I'm looking for some kind of binder, for example, or some way of organizing how a project evolves.
But the map is not there to prevent us from getting lost. Getting lost is an important part of the process.
Maybe it's not getting lost, but being alive and creative and immersed in what's going on in the classroom.
But I feel the need for something that helps name what you're doing, so that you're understanding it as you're living it.
If we think of it like hiking, the map is the thing we use to keep from getting lost, but when you have that third thing - the magic of emergent curriculum in the moment - you feel you can take the risk of the path that is not on the map.
But there are two kinds of "lost" - there's getting lost in wonder and challenge, and there's also an unproductive lost.
Within this analogy, I began wondering whether mapping is an activity in which we plan curriculum from a preconceived guide - like planning a hiking route according to a map of the area - or as the process of making the map for a piece of uncharted terrain. The question is, then, who is making the map?
As the session continued, I began to realize that the greatest challenge CM faces us with at the Charter is that it is an idea that was conceptualized in a paradigm - the paradigm - that we are trying to move away from. However, in this challenge lies its greatest potential: as one of my colleagues commented:
I feel like, in the work that we are doing, because we represent a paradigm shift in our fundamental ideas about education, we are mapping in this new paradigm, moving from the concept of external knowledge to internal knowledge - once we shift our concept of knowledge, we shift everything else, including planning, assessment, etc. We have to bring people all the way there, including ourselves.
I left our day together with Louise re-grounded, to continue the analogy, in the terrain I find myself on here at the Charter. I have to believe that, because we are mapping within a new paradigm, we are, indeed, the map-makers of our curricula; indeed, we are re-imagining what curriculum can be. Yet, even though I would never have imagined taking on such a task, I know I am not alone. All of us here are making our maps - sometimes with each other, mostly with our students, and always in a communal sense of adventure across the school.
Finally, I wonder if we didn't begin to uncover one of the secrets of this new paradigm today. My colleague above described "moving form the concept of external knowledge to internal knowledge", which relates back to my lack of satisfaction with the analogy of the tool belt. If we choose to take on curriculum mapping in an educational paradigm, in which knowledge comes first from within the individual, and grows through experience with the world and exchange in community, then our first lesson seems to be this: Not only are we the map-makers, notating our observations of unknown ground, we - with our students - are imagining the terrain into being to begin with.
Curriculum mapping: What is it?
Today's opening professional development with Louise on curriculum mapping was so rich, but I realize it will take a two separate posts to explain it all! So I'm starting with what I've learned - albeit, in a very quick inquiry - about the concept of curriculum mapping (CM).
After our conversation today, I noticed a book on the library shelf on CM: Getting Results with Curriculum Mapping (2004), edited by Heidi Hayes Jacobs. Jacobs, I believe, wrote the first definitive work on CM, called Mapping the Big Picture (1997), and is now the Director of Curriculum 21, a company that teaches, coaches, and supports schools and districts in implementing curriculum mapping.
After a brief read of the book, and some Internet research, the impression I get is that CM is a re-imagining of the purpose of state standards and benchmarks for learning. Currently, teachers look at what students are expected to know of their specialty, and derive their curriculum accordingly - either in grade-level teams, department-based teams, or as individuals. CM seems to prod teachers to think more collaboratively about the standards as a trajectory of learning rather than a fragmented series of topics to learn. As a result, they can better understand how their specialty (grade level and/or subject) fits into the larger arc of a student's journey acquiring necessary skills and knowledge.
The “work” of CM is layered. Teachers must first identify as a collective learning community, across grade levels and subject departments. They must come to consensus within their specialties as to what requires consistency and what requires flexibility in each subject area. As a result of this deliberation, schools and districts achieve an “essential” map, a skeleton, perhaps, for the curriculum of each grade level and subject area to be built upon.
CM yields no finished product, but rather, an established culture of communication among teachers. With the help of technology, teachers enter their broad plans for a year’s worth of curriculum into a database, which can be accessed by all other teachers involved. Categories of information on each unit include:
Essential Questions: overarching questions that guide instruction and provide connections to big ideas beyond the classroom
Content: broad topic of study, including major subcategories and underlying concepts
Skills: required for mastery of big ideas, including demonstration of knowledge and generally critical skills
Assessments: evidence of understanding of big ideas, usually based in product or performance, with flexibility for varying expressions of understanding
Activities: support the learning of skills
Resources: print materials, field trips, audio/visual media, and teacher resources
Once units are entered into the database, the information they provide becomes fluid, accessible to everyone. At this point, rather than continuing making curriculum decisions by grade level or department team, teachers can meet in “vertical” (in groups of K-2 teachers, for example) and “cross-disciplinary” teams to look at student performance data and determine how the curriculum can be adjusted to better meet their needs. And that is the real crux of CM: the point of curriculum is to ensure that the needs of students are met in the trajectory of their K-12 education. When Jacobs writes about the imaginary student present at each teacher meeting, meant to keep conversation focused on the students, I remember a colleague of mine who continually reminded me, “We don’t teach curriculum, we teach students.” Though it takes an immense amount of work to implement CM, Jacobs considers it a necessary adjustment to the current paradigm of curriculum planning and decision-making.
Getting Results consists of several chapters by varying educators and administrators who report on how CM has been implemented in their schools, and what they have found in the process. Each examines CM from a different perspective: a whole school district, an independent school, the principal's role, necessary technology, etc. Jacobs writes a few chapters, herself, providing some synthesis and overarching ideas and questions involved in the process of institutionalizing CM.
Two interesting analogies caught my eye in this book. The first compared CM to a tool belt, complete with the following one-to-one comparison (p.11):
... [C]urriculum mapping is like a tool belt because it contains or holds information about what a teacher really teaches:
The belt is the calendar that organizes the tools
The belt buckle allows for adjustable pacing through the school year
The content hammers in the standards - the nails
The mapping tool drills in essential questions for authentic probing and learning
The pliers (skills) hold the content, standards, and assessments together
The screwdriver turns content into knowledge
The measuring tape can be used to assess student buildings (products)
The other analogy is offered by Jacobs in the last chapter of the book (p.131):
If a patient is admitted to the hospital for surgery, who among the professionals should meet to give the best possible care? Who should meet to work toward ultimate recovery and health? The best interest of the patient is served when the surgeon works with the chain of care - from the internal medicine physician, to the receiving nurse, to the anesthesiologist... In short, decisions must be made among the actual people who are going to attend to the patient’s needs.
So must teachers organize themselves when making curriculum decisions: not around subject area or grade level, but around the students they teach. This suggestion reminds me of my work in schools in Germany, where students are organized into classes, based in one classroom, while teachers roam from one classroom to another to do their teaching. Each teacher still has his/her specialty, but is responsible, for example, for teaching that subject in classes 10a, 7b, and 5c. (Numbers correspond to grade level, the letters to sections) I’m not entirely aware if German teachers meet together to make curriculum decisions, but I can imagine that such a school set-up would make such decision-making, as Jacobs is suggesting, possible.
What I hear Jacobs saying is that we are currently so focused on the crisis of education, we’ve become too focused on the content we are teaching, and lost sight of the students. I might argue that this has long been the case, how public education was designed from the beginning. But more of my response in later posts. I found a very helpful video on YouTube of an interview with Jacobs that continues with this analogy further: click here to view. She presents a hypothetical situation, in which she imagines a student’s history of learning traveling with her the way a patient’s medical history travels. No matter where that patient is being cared for, his caregivers can access the most important information about his allergies, past surgeries, medications, etc. Likewise, teachers could also have access to the curriculum each of their students has already experienced, including big ideas and critical skills, so that they can properly build on prior learning.
Finally, I’ll briefly summarize with a third analogy, taken from the name of curriculum mapping, itself. Curriculum comes from the Latin for “course”, as in a path to walk. In this way, curriculum mapping intends for teachers to create a map to help them guide students across the terrain of their learning. Because students are being held accountable to the same standards of learning, it is important that teachers come to a consensus about important benchmarks along the way (benchmarks also being a term commonly used in the language of educational standards). Each student may walk their own path and build their own collection of experiences in their education, but teachers must work together to assure that each path hits the necessary benchmarks, so that all students end their K-12 journey with an equitable collection of valuable learning experiences.
Other useful links:
Heidi Hayes Jacobs on Critical Transformations
Curriculum mapping overview (Powerpoint)
After our conversation today, I noticed a book on the library shelf on CM: Getting Results with Curriculum Mapping (2004), edited by Heidi Hayes Jacobs. Jacobs, I believe, wrote the first definitive work on CM, called Mapping the Big Picture (1997), and is now the Director of Curriculum 21, a company that teaches, coaches, and supports schools and districts in implementing curriculum mapping.
After a brief read of the book, and some Internet research, the impression I get is that CM is a re-imagining of the purpose of state standards and benchmarks for learning. Currently, teachers look at what students are expected to know of their specialty, and derive their curriculum accordingly - either in grade-level teams, department-based teams, or as individuals. CM seems to prod teachers to think more collaboratively about the standards as a trajectory of learning rather than a fragmented series of topics to learn. As a result, they can better understand how their specialty (grade level and/or subject) fits into the larger arc of a student's journey acquiring necessary skills and knowledge.
The “work” of CM is layered. Teachers must first identify as a collective learning community, across grade levels and subject departments. They must come to consensus within their specialties as to what requires consistency and what requires flexibility in each subject area. As a result of this deliberation, schools and districts achieve an “essential” map, a skeleton, perhaps, for the curriculum of each grade level and subject area to be built upon.
CM yields no finished product, but rather, an established culture of communication among teachers. With the help of technology, teachers enter their broad plans for a year’s worth of curriculum into a database, which can be accessed by all other teachers involved. Categories of information on each unit include:
Essential Questions: overarching questions that guide instruction and provide connections to big ideas beyond the classroom
Content: broad topic of study, including major subcategories and underlying concepts
Skills: required for mastery of big ideas, including demonstration of knowledge and generally critical skills
Assessments: evidence of understanding of big ideas, usually based in product or performance, with flexibility for varying expressions of understanding
Activities: support the learning of skills
Resources: print materials, field trips, audio/visual media, and teacher resources
Once units are entered into the database, the information they provide becomes fluid, accessible to everyone. At this point, rather than continuing making curriculum decisions by grade level or department team, teachers can meet in “vertical” (in groups of K-2 teachers, for example) and “cross-disciplinary” teams to look at student performance data and determine how the curriculum can be adjusted to better meet their needs. And that is the real crux of CM: the point of curriculum is to ensure that the needs of students are met in the trajectory of their K-12 education. When Jacobs writes about the imaginary student present at each teacher meeting, meant to keep conversation focused on the students, I remember a colleague of mine who continually reminded me, “We don’t teach curriculum, we teach students.” Though it takes an immense amount of work to implement CM, Jacobs considers it a necessary adjustment to the current paradigm of curriculum planning and decision-making.
Getting Results consists of several chapters by varying educators and administrators who report on how CM has been implemented in their schools, and what they have found in the process. Each examines CM from a different perspective: a whole school district, an independent school, the principal's role, necessary technology, etc. Jacobs writes a few chapters, herself, providing some synthesis and overarching ideas and questions involved in the process of institutionalizing CM.
Two interesting analogies caught my eye in this book. The first compared CM to a tool belt, complete with the following one-to-one comparison (p.11):
... [C]urriculum mapping is like a tool belt because it contains or holds information about what a teacher really teaches:
The belt is the calendar that organizes the tools
The belt buckle allows for adjustable pacing through the school year
The content hammers in the standards - the nails
The mapping tool drills in essential questions for authentic probing and learning
The pliers (skills) hold the content, standards, and assessments together
The screwdriver turns content into knowledge
The measuring tape can be used to assess student buildings (products)
The other analogy is offered by Jacobs in the last chapter of the book (p.131):
If a patient is admitted to the hospital for surgery, who among the professionals should meet to give the best possible care? Who should meet to work toward ultimate recovery and health? The best interest of the patient is served when the surgeon works with the chain of care - from the internal medicine physician, to the receiving nurse, to the anesthesiologist... In short, decisions must be made among the actual people who are going to attend to the patient’s needs.
So must teachers organize themselves when making curriculum decisions: not around subject area or grade level, but around the students they teach. This suggestion reminds me of my work in schools in Germany, where students are organized into classes, based in one classroom, while teachers roam from one classroom to another to do their teaching. Each teacher still has his/her specialty, but is responsible, for example, for teaching that subject in classes 10a, 7b, and 5c. (Numbers correspond to grade level, the letters to sections) I’m not entirely aware if German teachers meet together to make curriculum decisions, but I can imagine that such a school set-up would make such decision-making, as Jacobs is suggesting, possible.
She continues her analogy: One place where there is no opportunity to for thoughtful planning and preparation is the emergency room, where medical personnel know almost nothing about the prior record or experience of each arriving patient. There is an urgent, anxious tone to the set of decisions that must be made quickly without benefit of a strong understanding of the patient’s experience. Sometimes it seems as if we give an emergency room education, because we have so little good information about our learners.
What I hear Jacobs saying is that we are currently so focused on the crisis of education, we’ve become too focused on the content we are teaching, and lost sight of the students. I might argue that this has long been the case, how public education was designed from the beginning. But more of my response in later posts. I found a very helpful video on YouTube of an interview with Jacobs that continues with this analogy further: click here to view. She presents a hypothetical situation, in which she imagines a student’s history of learning traveling with her the way a patient’s medical history travels. No matter where that patient is being cared for, his caregivers can access the most important information about his allergies, past surgeries, medications, etc. Likewise, teachers could also have access to the curriculum each of their students has already experienced, including big ideas and critical skills, so that they can properly build on prior learning.
Finally, I’ll briefly summarize with a third analogy, taken from the name of curriculum mapping, itself. Curriculum comes from the Latin for “course”, as in a path to walk. In this way, curriculum mapping intends for teachers to create a map to help them guide students across the terrain of their learning. Because students are being held accountable to the same standards of learning, it is important that teachers come to a consensus about important benchmarks along the way (benchmarks also being a term commonly used in the language of educational standards). Each student may walk their own path and build their own collection of experiences in their education, but teachers must work together to assure that each path hits the necessary benchmarks, so that all students end their K-12 journey with an equitable collection of valuable learning experiences.
Other useful links:
Heidi Hayes Jacobs on Critical Transformations
Curriculum mapping overview (Powerpoint)
Open House
This week is Open House at the Charter School. This means that upwards of 100 teachers will be with us for part of the week, observing classes, learning about Reggio Emilia and inquiry-based learning, and exchanging their reflections on their own work with each other. While certainly stressful on the Charter teachers and students, it is sure to be an invaluable opportunity to come together in community with fellow colleagues who are chewing on the same questions I am, perhaps.
It also means Louise Cadwell is with us, leading workshops and lecturing on Reggio Emilia, curriculum mapping, and incorporating "21st century skills", as she calls them, into today's teaching and learning. She is the recent founder of Cadwell Collaborative, a consulting service for educators and schools interested in implementing curricula that support 21st century skills, including sustainability education. She’s also well-known within the Reggio community for two books based on her work in the original Reggio Emilia schools: Bringing Reggio Emilia Home and Bringing Learning to Life.
I'm looking forward to blogging about the week as it progresses. It will take a number of posts, I’m sure to sort out all of my experiences, reflections, and studies.
It also means Louise Cadwell is with us, leading workshops and lecturing on Reggio Emilia, curriculum mapping, and incorporating "21st century skills", as she calls them, into today's teaching and learning. She is the recent founder of Cadwell Collaborative, a consulting service for educators and schools interested in implementing curricula that support 21st century skills, including sustainability education. She’s also well-known within the Reggio community for two books based on her work in the original Reggio Emilia schools: Bringing Reggio Emilia Home and Bringing Learning to Life.
I'm looking forward to blogging about the week as it progresses. It will take a number of posts, I’m sure to sort out all of my experiences, reflections, and studies.
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