Lessons Learned

This is the fifth post about how to develop a curriculum review system in one’s school. It deals with where your school stands in using a curriculum mapping tool to support the curriculum review process. Just as the first post on the big picture, these are questions for members of the community to work through before they begin designing their system. These series of posts support an article my wife Margaret and I have coming out in the December/January 2008 Learning and Leading with Technology magazine.

1) How does your school currently document and later archive your curriculum?

2) How do you organize your units as in timeline, size, importance, etc.?

3) If you have an online curriculum mapping tool, what are its strengths and weaknesses? What barriers are there to using it?

4) If you don’t have a mapping tool, what are the barriers for your school in either purchasing or creating one?

5) How does or doesn’t this tool connect to what is happening in the classrooms?

6) How does it connect to your online course management tool?

7) What does the template for all of your units look like?

How is your unit planning template functional in guiding input to then lead to output/action?

9) How does it support your school’s teaching and learning beliefs (i.e., mission statement, strategic plan)?

What other questions (and answers) come to mind?

I know I ramble but time is short and we have the podcast tonight. Here are some thoughts about the process of getting administrators onboard as we shift our schools…

Jeff has been running workshops on reviewing one’s school mission and I have been writing about how to integrate one’s mission and school-wide learning outcomes into everything you do in your school. So the first step is to work with one’s learning community to hire Jeff to come in and shake things up clearing off the table of outdated mission outcomes and opening up the discussion to what the community including students, parents and faculty believe in and value. Start with the basic questions of “what is learning and understanding?” and “What do our students need to learn?” and “How can we prepare them to be citizens skilled to handle a very changing world?”. I also like the idea of writing mission outcomes in the form of actions/skills/habits that are enduring and applicable to various situations. To say we want students to be “lifelong learners”, how about instead talking about the habits/skills of being critical thinkers and problem solvers that gives students the tools to be lifelong learners.  Hopefully one’s school will see the value of the the learning 2.0 constructs that folks are writing about and discussing in the edublogosphere to make them central to their vision statements.

Once the mission/vision is developed and action plans are created to integrate it into the school’s culture, the next step is develop curriculum, instruction and assessments that will get one’s students to learn the critical thinking, problem solving, cooperative and collaborative learning skills that are hopefully in the mission outcomes that also includes an inquiry driven approach to learning that engages the students in discussions and learning with individuals outside the school walls.

Really focus is on Stage 1 of McTigue and Wiggin’s UbD process for all the curriculum units. It all comes down to what the enduring understandings we are teaching to. Administrators must collaborate in the curriculum review process. The conversations and unpacking of the standards into the EUs is where we bring the administrators on board to constructivist, inquiry, student-centered learning. We have to be ready to have the critical conversations asking administrators how we are to reach our schools’ mission statements dedicated to teaching students critical thinking, problem solving and cooperative learning skills so that they can be global, information savvy citizens ready to adapt to the every changing world. If our administrators are charged to deliver the educational experience to reach the mission and habits for learning, get them to explain how we can do it in classrooms that where the curriculum being taught doesn’t support the schools’ new mission statement. As we move to Stage 2 to develop the assessments and Stage 3 to create the learning activities, the administrator in the curriculum meetings should start coming onboard as we come up with ways to use information literacy and technology to assess and teach the students.

So how does all of this happen without the administrator being on board? It doesn’t. The hope is that by going through this process that the reluctant or simply not getting the picture administrator buys into the process to support the mission that was created by the community. We also must take items off our adminstrators’ plates to allow them to be the instructional leaders in our schools. Less is more especially when it comes to empowering administrators to focus their time on decisions that support learning.

Do you want to “hook” your students into your topic of study? How about immersing them in the images and discussions of your subject? While we use bulletin boards for images to display information about our units of study, how about also displaying information digitally? You can put together a slide show to run continuously on your classroom television, projector & screen and on your classroom computers to surround your students with images from the unit you are studying. An example would be to show people, architecture, art, food, social scenes, etc. for a social studies unit. As inquiry driven educators, we want to put those hooks out there to lead our students to pursue answers to their own questions.

With so many recordings of famous speeches and podcasts on so many topics, it also works to either download the files when possible or set the home page in your classroom browsers to have direct links to podcasts that tie into subject matter. If you are a 1:1 laptop school, look to create a Web page with the podcast links, images and research links for your students to add as a tab to their browser home pages.

A nice source for images and screensaver software is Webshots.  Download their slide show presenter and start adding images from their vast photo database to construct a show that fits your curriculum needs. Don’t forget to check out their community pages where Webshot members share their best shots for you to download. Also think about challenging students to find more images or draw their own (think literature lessons where students draw their pictures of characters and scenes) to be added to the collection.

Cheers to Mike Lambert for starting this practice many years ago in my son’s classroom.

Image Source