Over the weekend after I had properly digested the information from Chapter 5, I decided to use it as ammunition to criticize the practices of the Oakland school district where my friend works in the assessment department, designing and distributing district wide tests. The discussion proved to be quite fruitful in that I realized that my grasp on what Ozar is saying is not as solid as I thought it was. I was left with many uncertainties and questions about what "Curriculum that Works" looks like.
My first question is where do we start. Ozar begins the chapter talking about real life skills that our children need in order to be successful once they leave our school walls.(p.62) So we begin there and create our graduation outcomes. These I recognize as our school learning expectations. But what if those aren't written well. Can we go no further until those are not firmly established? I understand that Ozar is making the point that we need to be connecting more big ideas in our schools instead of using the industrial model, but that makes it seem like it is a total change in the institution. Can I work to improve curriculum in 1st grade if the 6th, 4th, and 2nd grade teachers have not created outcomes for what those graduation skills look like in their grades? If I haven't established overall 1st grade outcomes can I establish outcomes for reading or a math lesson?
Ozar tells us that National Committees should put together the broad outcomes of a specific discipline such as math which "give educators the best place to begin with local curriculum develpment..." (p.67) Who is that is designing the "local" curriculum? Is it the state, district, or each school on it's own. I am lead to believe that she thinks it is the school as she refers to other factors such as mission, philosophy, catholic identity, parental aspirations etc. being important aspects of the outcomes that are created. I myself think it should be done more on the school level, but is it possible for all schools to do this. My school has lots of resources and an energetic staff and I am not even sure how the process would go for us, so what happens to a school with low moral and very little resources.
I was trying to convince my friend that his job basically stifled the growth of the children in the Oakland Unified School District because they bombarded them with tests that were based on standards created for the entire state. He explained that the tests are meant to support the teachers so that they can understand where their students are at academically. So the idea of assessment guiding teaching I guess is a bit similar to Ozar, and the assessments are created according to outcome like standards. So this may follow Ozar's theory but I think the break down is who is designing these outcomes and these assessments. If an assessment is made for numerous students across a discrict is it a valid assessment? If it's not, is there another way to measure one school's success over another's within Ozar's theory?
Finally, Ozar discussed two planes in which the outcomes should be created from, the discipline specific plane and value-integration plane. (p.68) Is that just for graduation outcomes or do all outcomes need to follow this. In the lower grades the higher order thinking or application of knowledge isn't impossible but sometimes more difficult. Is "Students will produce the 4 related math facts when given 3 numbers in a fact family" a good outcome or does it need more "value-integration"?
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You raised the question of standardized assessments - ultimately beneficial or detrimental - a question that I have long had. The context of the Oakland School district is quite thought-provoking. Just how valid is an uniform state assessment in an inner-city school with so many societal variables impacting a student's learning?
ReplyDeleteThe scenario, also, of not all teachers being on the same page in the curriculum development process leads to some tough inquires. Ideally, the establishment of an umbrella of the same overall aspirations on the school level should be the prerequisite to curriculum development of curriculum for the individual grade levels. Realistically, though, the development of curriculum for individual grade levels might arise "piecemeal," with individual teachers creating their own at various times. Not having worked in the environment of grammar school, I am not sure how all this happens in that actual scenario. I can reflect on the process where I taught, though.
Developing curriculum in our undergraduate level was a relatively simple process for an adjunct. This is because when a contract/adjunct teacher first teaches a class, usually he/she inherits the already established school standards and a curriculum from the prior teacher of the course. Every two years, my department would ask if we would like to redesign the course curriculum. We had full latitude on that task. Overall review of the actual underlying standards came every four years or so, as prescribed by the accreditation body. (For the adjuncts, participating in that stage was a non-mandatory.) So the teacher did her or his own thing; yet, to create/maintain a truly effective curriculum, a teacher needed to review others relevant to his/her class. The idea of collaboration was truly important in this regard. This, I believe, relates to your ideas concerning different teachers in different phases of curriculum development. It doesn't really matter what level of education; the basics needs and questions are the same.