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.
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Donna,
ReplyDeleteThese chapters made me think about our SLE's too (affectionately pronounced around here as sleeze:) It sounds like your school has done a great job analyzing your SLEs year after year to make sure that they are truly learning outcomes from the students. You always have to remember to make the student's point of view first on the list of priorities.
Donna, I think that it is interesting that the preparation for the WASC visit has been the impetus for work and revision of the outcomes-based curriculum in your school. I'm very conscious that the documentation required by school administrators and external accreditation agencies are usually the main motivating forces for the implementation of curriculum ideas. Unfortunately, in my experience, most teachers do not like being 'pinned down' to the extent that an outcome-based curriculum requires, yet they can see the benefit of specifying and teaching so that the outcomes are achieved. I have found the outcomes-based curriculum to be most successful when more than one teacher is teaching a subject at a particular level and common assessments and time allocations are used. This has meant that teachers have to talk together about what the students are to achieve and how this could be done. At high schools in Australia, especially in the final years of high school, cross-marking of student's assessment tasks is quite common, and this helps teachers to talk about what is being assessed and to set common standards.
ReplyDeletelearning process has two sides, you mentioned the students' side, and we have to consider also the teacher's side, asking the question, is she/he equipped with the means to make the curriculum understandable using the new technology
ReplyDeleteLast week, Wagner wrote about the need to stop asking for teacher buy-in. Instead, he said schools need to ask teachers to take ownership.
ReplyDeleteThis SLE discussion reminds me of that. Your faculty had a chance to "take ownership" of your school outcomes. However, my school already had SLEs when I arrived so I was asked to "buy into" the existing SLEs.
Of course, it is impractical to ask schools to recreate SLEs every time they hire teachers. (Imagine that....) It is an interesting dilemma. How do we allow new hires to "take ownership" of a school's SLEs, not just "buy into" them?
Donna: I'm especially conscious of your description of using the outcomes in the observation process, as I'm about to start the second round with our teachers (conscious of course, of all the research that suggests that formal teacher observations have no impact on student achievement!). From what you describe, the most helpful process is the conversation and revision that takes place when two teachers are intentionally discussing student learning. I think this is something every teacher hungers for--more time to do this. I really like what Adrian says about cross-marking of papers--an excellent undertaking!
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