Is Curriculum a Guide or a Script?

It has been a while since my last post.  Actually, it seems like a lifetime ago.  I will diverge from my normal discussion of science curriculum for a moment, but will bring it back around.  Just stay with me.

Last July, my father was diagnosed with an extremely rare form of cancer undoubtedly from exposure to Agent Orange during his year of service in Vietnam.  He was a helicopter pilot and was tasked with spraying the herbicide.  He told me that due to the prop wash, he would come back soaked in it.

My father just prior to deployment in 1968.

I was out of the office almost all of November due to the complications he has endured through this process.  I've learned more about the science and art of medicine in these last few months than I ever wanted to know.  At one point, I found myself sitting at my father's bedside with my mother and the oncologist as we discussed treatment options.  The Mayo Clinic was consulted and a treatment regime was prescribed which had been deemed effective for most patients.  I say "most" because my father has a rather complex medical history.  Complex enough that it should qualify him for a season of "House".

The oncologist read through the recommendations with us and reviewed  my father's most recent test results.  Based on these results, he decided to follow a slightly different regime.   As of this posting, my father has seen a 70% reduction in the "bad cells" and we are hopeful that by the end of January to be in remission.

What are the lessons to be learned here?

• A set of treatments was prescribed.  
• Test results prior to treatment indicated a modified, more individual course of action.    
• The treatment is proving to be successful. 
• There is an art and science to treatment.  

Let's get back on the topic of this blog.  My primary job, at the moment, is developing curriculum based on the Next Generation Science Standards for the throngs of teachers in my system. This curriculum is a suggested course of action.  It provides many of the components needed to assist teachers in developing mastery of the standards in students.  Now, I'm not comparing myself to the Mayo Clinic, but the expectation is that I am the local expert on the NGSS.  Now I could complete this analogy but I think you know where I am going.  Teachers are the doctors and students are the patients.

What is the purpose of curriculum?  As a teacher, I lived two very different realities when it came to curriculum.  As a kindergarten teacher, I had no curriculum.  I based my instruction on the end of grade level expectations.  I had to make up curriculum on my own.  As a high school science teacher, I received curriculum from my supervisor.  A three inch thick binder.  Blue with a green cover as I recall.  I remember looking through it and realizing that, while it had good lessons it did not meet the needs of my students.  Once again, I had to make up my own curriculum, but at least I had a starting point.  

The idea of following a curriculum, chapter and verse, never occurred to me. I always viewed curriculum as a guide developed by people who have a pretty good idea about what most kids need.  We'll call this a science.  It was then my job as a teacher to find the best fit for my students. That takes a little science and a lot of art to make that happen. Great teachers are almost poetic.

As I discussed back in October (Articulating Expectations into a Personalized Learning Environment), I outlined a new set of curriculum expectations developed by my school system.  In summary,  through pre-assessment, we formatively use data to diagnose where students are before instruction starts.  The result is multiple groups of students consuming instruction based on their instructional need in the same room.

 I would hope that the merits of small group instruction are self-evident, but consider this.  In one of my prior jobs, I worked with "gifted" students.  How many of these students coast through instruction they have already mastered?  Conversely, how many students endure instruction for which they are not ready?  

The question is, then what.  How do you logistically manage a class like this. At the secondary level, there are more options.  Students can take different classes.  At the elementary level, it is more self-contained.  A reality lost on many people outside (and some inside) education.

So, I am opening a dialogue to discuss these ideas.  I am going to host a webinar on February 2 (Ground Hog Day) to develop some concrete strategies for all of us.  Click on this hyperlink at 7:00 PM (EST).  The rough agenda will be as follows.

• I will discuss the specifics of the curriculum framework I developed   (I am open to other ideas.)
• Start building a set of management strategies for teachers
• Think beyond the current realities of classroom instruction.  Do we need a different concept of what a classroom is?  What does the field of  educational technology need to offer us?  Do we need to "Amazonify" how students access content? 

I look forward to talking with you at the webinar!

Using Assessments To Improve Solutions

I just had two great days of professional development on assessment.  Yes, I said assessment.  Our instructor was Jan Chappuis.  The entire focus was how to use assessment in a formative way rather than just assigning a grade.  As a matter of fact, grading was discussed very little.  Jan's view is that formative assessments should not be graded but used by teachers and, more importantly, students to determine where they are in terms of mastery.  It means establishing clear learning targets and providing time for students to reflect on assessment results.  A really good explanation of these ideas can be found in an article from the November 2005 issue of "School Leadership" (link).

So what does this mean for my curriculum.  The diagram below illustrates a rudimentary outline of a unit (click to enlarge).  

  
The first lesson introduces the unit problem.  This previews unit concepts prior to the students taking a pre-assessment.  The idea is to give students a diagnostic way to see what they need to learn in order to create a solution to the problem.  The lesson concludes with students imagining solutions for the next day.

Theoretically, the teacher will receive the pre-assessment information from the assessment system in order to create student work teams.  During the second lesson, these teams share their ideas, create a plan based on these ideas.  The team then builds an its initial solution.    This may take several forms depending on the performance expectations.  As described in the previous post (2017: Innovation Block) that may take the form of an engineering design solution such as a car.

The one thing I really like about building the prototype up front is its immediate capacity for differentiation.  Students that are really good at designing a solution have a much harder road ahead of them in order to improve on their original designs.  The lowest performing students can then have tremendous growth.

 Once the teams develop their first solution, they will get to evaluate it in light of their pre-assessment information.  This reflection on the pre-assessment is really important as it sets up Lessons 3 to (X).  The "X" is an unknown variable depending on the number of lessons in the unit.  Each lesson should be designed to answer the question "How will this help me improve my solution?"  At the end, teams revise their solutions and test a second time.  This constitutes their summative assessment.

A word about the engineering design process.  I'm sure many of you have seen the many variations of the engineering design process which usually take the form of cycle.  I agree that this process can be cyclic, but in the real world a solution is eventually marketed.  I have created a hybrid of several versions (below).

You will note the spur that says "Final Design". Yes, solutions can always be improved, but if that was the case, no technology would ever be sold.  What changed my mind about this was a video I watched several years ago about IDEO and the process they used while redesigning a shopping cart.  They tested several designs but in the end made one final version.  

But What Does "All" Mean

I tend to approach curriculum writing like any project by laying out the constraints.  As I started pondering all the constraints before me,  I have to admit I was more than a little overwhelmed (See below).  When we use the word differentiation in education, it typically means ability considerations.  How do you meet the needs of a student with the dyslexia at the same time meeting the needs of a student capable of reading four grade levels above the norm in the same classroom?  That is a very real dilemma for most elementary classroom teachers. And before you say it, there is no such thing as homogeneous grouping.  The closest we get to homogeneous grouping is by age.  Other than that, every child is different-period.

Another view of differentiation stipulates looking how students learn.  This leads a discussion of learning styles.  So lets consider just these two examples.  Think of it like a grid (below).  When I plan a lesson, I would need to consider how to meet the needs of a student with dyslexia that learns best by moving.  Now imagine doing that with a class of thirty students.

Now just to make things interesting, lets think about making the curriculum culturally relevant.  That gives us X,Y, and Z coordinates to consider.  How do I meet the needs of a student reading four grade levels above her peers, that learns best visually, and is from a culture outside of the community norm. Start compounding this with thirty students and you get an idea of the task before me and classroom teachers. 

In previous curriculum projects, we spent much time and effort building differentiation suggestions into our curriculum.  However, we do not know if they are effective at meeting students needs or even used by teachers.

  

Recently, differentiation has been re-branded .  Enter the age of "Universal Design  for Learning".   The premise for this model of curriculum is that rather than waiting until the teacher has to make the differentiation (think of it like bolting on a modification), the curriculum is written in a way that is accessible to ALL students.  I agree with the idea, but have trouble seeing it in the real world.   

Perhaps the best example of this is found in the discussions surrounding personalized learning environments.   As a classroom teacher faced with an ever growing stack of IEPs (Individual Education Plans), I speculated that in the future everyone would have an IEP.  Personalized Learning seems to be moving in that direction...Sort of. 

The great difference between an IEP and Personalized Learning is control.  IEPs are developed and moderated by a group of people on behalf of the student.  They take tremendous amounts of time and resources to develop and monitor.  In the end, the student is escorted through their educational experience.  Any difficulties that lie before them are removed.   In many cases, these students then graduate from high school not sure how to learn on their own without that escort.  Personalized learning changes this premise.  One of the goals of personalized learning is to teach the students to think about how they learn and to select the "learning objects" best suited to how them.  This requires access to a computer and an Internet connection.  For glimpse at an extreme example of  this type of classroom I would look the work of Sugata Mitra.  

So the question for today,  how are you meeting the needs of all students?