Writing Curriculum

After reading Lorraine Ozar's Creating A Curriculum That Works, Chapters 1 - 4, it made me go back to our school's SLE's and take another hard look at what we had written. This is our planning year for next year's WASC visit. As a faculty, we worked long and hard on these. We had originally written these a number of years ago and have adjusted each year as was necessary. As teachers, we all needed to remember that student outcomes are written from the student's point of view, not the teacher's. Using Bloom's Taxonomy, we came up with outcomes that identify what students are to learn and how students will demonstrate what has been learned. We spent a lot of time working on these. We had many discussions as a faculty when writing these as to whether we were writing a goal or if what we were writing were truly outcomes. It was then time to start collecting different samples of student's work to show the specific learning that was taking place. These student samples were filed in each classroom's SLE evidence box. It was quite a process and only made our curriculum that much better with more active learning taking place.

With formal classroom observations, each teacher needs to write up a formal lesson plan where the lesson outcome (objective) is clearly stated. The pre-observation visit includes discussion on the objective to see if it is clearly stated from a student's point of view with both a written and a verbal explanation as to how the objective will be reached. Is the objective a true statement of what the teacher would like the student to learn and the methods to be taken to help students learn that objective? For some faculty members this isn't always an easy job as many continue to think more in the traditional lesson planning instead of selecting the desired outcome first and then the curriculum is created to support the desired outcome. For those who have been in the educational field for many years, this has been quite an adjustment, almost reversing what they had been taught and had done for many years.

Blog I - Parents, Where Are They? / Digital Natives

I found the reading entitled, "Parenting: The Lost Art" by Kay S. Hymowitz to be the most disheartening of the articles assigned to read. Because most teachers/administrators involved with Catholic education emphasize the importance of a partnership with parents in educating youth, this cannot happen when parents take on a passive role and leave the job of education entirely in the hands of the teacher. Granted, children today are native speakers of the digital language; whereas, parents are digital immigrants which might be one reason for the passivity of parents today. Children's brains are wirede differently than their parents. Do they truly understand the best way(s) to help their child be as successful as possible? On a personal note, I have had children who struggle with math and when I had the need to contact a parent to inform them of their child's difficulty, their response was that they could no longer help their child as they did not understand the math themselves. This was 6th grade math. I was never sure if that was a true statement or becuase parents sre so busy today trying to manage work as well as a family that it is easier to break the "partnership" and put the full responsibility to the classroom teacher. This has been a problem for a number of years and appears to become more prevalent each year.

The article I found to be most interesting was "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants" by Marc Prensky. As educators, the need to change methodology to reach the digital natives is of utmost importance. Being in Catholic education for 25 years, I have found a need to always be changing with the times when it comes to working with youth. The biggest challenge has always been interacting with students to keep them focused and understanding curriculum. Now, being in the position of administrator, I felt the need to jump into the 21st century with updating technology by installing SmartBoards in all classrooms, K - 8. This has made a huge difference in the presentation of lessons plus the interaction of students with the lesson being taught. The interactive boards facilitate student participation through the ability to interact with materials on the board. Lessons can be called back up from a home computer for review or to allow a child who was absent to view the missed lesson. Students are more motivated and focused, as I have witnessed, with the use of these boards. The digital natives are quite at ease with the use of these boards, and at times, helping the teacher to do navigate through certain programs connected to the interactive board.