Category: Curriculum Liberation Front

Thoughts about what we do to children in schools, and how we do it.

Governors, business, and the toughening of standards

Posted on by Dale

On Feb. 28, the estimable New York Times reported on one of the seemingly biweekly governors conferences. (Perdue on the phone to Schwarzenegger: “Hey, I’ve never been to Rhode Island either! Let’s go talk about inner city crime!”)

At this particular conference, they were rattling around about No Child Left Behind, or as we call it at my school, Every Child Dragged Along, and the Times reported that the governors said that “business leaders” said that workers were arriving without the appropriate level of skills. The governors responded by deciding to “toughen the standards,” i.e., make the tests harder. Well, thirteen of the governors did. Those big ol’ important states didn’t. But thirteen of the smaller ones did.

Workers without skills? What does that mean?

Let’s assume for a moment that these leaders of business cannot possibly be talking about college grads. And let’s be a little more generous and assume that they are probably not talking about graduates of any of our technical schools.

So what does that leave us? High school graduates? Are we talking about high school kids not having “skills”?

Okay, well, then, I think it’s wonderful that the leaders of our business world are concerned that their workers come to them without a firm knowledge of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, or the Bohr model of the atom, or the difference between a Petrarchan and a Shakespearean sonnet.

What? That’s not it? That’s not what they’re whining about? Oh, skills, not knowledge. I get it. They have an unacceptably large number of high school level workers who cannot read, write, compute, etc. Well, that’s different.

Now I can totally see why the governors would immediately want to make the tests harder.

Are these people actually the leaders of our economic system?

If it were me, I’d be taxing the hell out of business to pay for elementary reading coaches, to pay for a radical restructuring of K-2, to pay for whatever it would take so that every child who is capable would in fact be reading by 3rd grade. But that’s me, liberal that I am.

Last year, I was at the Georgia State STAR Student banquet, where I heard a leader of business actually say, “If we raised the graduation rate in Georgia to [some number I’ve forgotten], it would add an extra [some number in the millions] to our state’s economy.” He said it to a room full of Georgia’s absolute best educators and students, apparently without realizing that all of us were thinking, “So what you’re saying is that it would be worth it to Georgia’s businesses to give us that amount of money to improve schools?”

But, liberal that I am, I don’t think that’s what he was suggesting. I think what he and the governors want is for us to take those students who would have dropped out thirty years ago and, by sitting on them harder, turn them into the 12% who actually graduated, and that’s just the ones that graduated, not the ones who went to college. And then, you see, the profits will just roll in.

Well, not to the schools, but you get the idea.

A moratorium

Posted on by Dale

I hereby propose a moratorium on the word important in any GPS enduring understanding or essential question.

Today I attended a very good session for third grade teachers on “unpacking” a standard. When it got down to writing essential questions, it was amazing at the number of EQs that contained the word important. What got me to thinking about the issue was an EQ that my team wrote on the writing standard. We proposed, “Why is writing so hard?”, the idea being that we would tap into the students’ dislike/fear of writing and springboard into the various solutions as suggested by the elements of that standard.

The crowd reaction at first was one of excitement, but then it was suggested that the EQ was too “negative,” and the next thing we knew, the EQ had been amended to “Why is writing important?”

Well.

If the purpose of an essential question is to provoke discussion and exploration, and it is, then why in the name of all that’s engaging would we shy away from a provocative question like “Why is writing so hard?” and replace it with some teacher-talk like “Why is writing important?” There isn’t a kid on this planet who doesn’t see right through the “important” BS: it’s just a trap to enforce the student’s compliance with the teacher’s view of things. It is humbug of the most offensive sort.

I completely understand that not every teacher would want to lead off with such an in-your-face EQ, but honey, please. Most of the EQs were simply lesson plans in disguise. Do you really want to dig into whether “following the rules of grammar helps you understand written and oral communication?” ::yawn::

So we could have rewritten the question, “Are there ways to make writing easier for me?”, or “What can I do to make my writing better?”, or any other question that actually sounds like it might be asked by a student, preferably a question that produces some interest in seeing it answered.

Therefore, teachers, a new commandment: Thou shalt not write essential questions that merely embed thine unfiltered instructional agenda without any attempt to understand how a student in thy care might actually think.

Because that’s important.

GPS training

Posted on by Dale

Yesterday, I got to go to a session presented by dedicated fellow professionals here in Coweta County, the purpose of which was to nudge our teachers one more step into getting ready for the GPS.

First, let me say that the information was spot on, very important stuff, and that our presenters were sharp and prepared.

Second, let me say why I think it was not enough.

The purpose of the session was simply to introduce the vocabulary of the new curriculum: performance standard, essential question, enduring understandings, task, elements, etc., etc., etc. This all fell squarely into our View #1 of learning, taxon memory, in which the brain is confronted with what appears to be random, non-contextualized information, and it very appropriately resists learning it.

So here we had a very large room of dedicated teachers, most of whom I wager have been dreaming of a curriculum like the one we’re getting, and yet most of whom I’d wager again left that room still without the basic vocabulary of that new curriculum. Again, not the fault of our presenters.

What would I do differently, if my wand still worked?

  • Smaller groups. Plenty of discussion and sharing. It’s too easy for 100 people to abdicate responsibility for the information when there are 150 people in the room.
  • Examples of implementation at every step. Sure, there’s ELA2R1, but what will it look like when I have to do it with students?
  • Recognition of concerns, rooting out of misconceptions, confirming understanding, you know, the very things we’re supposed to do with students

Sure, easy enough for me to say, but my wand doesn’t work and there’s not enough funding or staffing to do it this way. Ah well.

And I will say this: Backwards design begins at home. Yo, State Department of Education, before we can design instruction that will fulfill these standards, before we can do our performance task, we have to know what the assessment is going to be! I can have all kinds of evidence of understanding on the part of our third graders about the travails of Frederick Douglass and the dynamics of slavery, but what is the CRCT going to ask about?

Page 1 problem

Posted on by Dale

Here’s the problem that crops up immediately in our study of Frederick Douglass: “Frederick Douglass was born a slave.” And what, to a 21st century third grader, does that mean? If our average 8-year-old doesn’t understand what slavery is, the whole point of choosing Douglass as part of our third-grade curriculum is lost.

Here’s a quick experiment:

The Three Kindreds of the Eldar were the Vanyar, the Noldor and the Teleri. All of the Vanyar and Noldor went to Aman. Many of the Teleri also journeyed to Valinor, but twice a host of this people turned away from the Journey in Middle-earth; these two kindreds are called Amanyar, the Eldar not of Aman. The first of these were the Nandor, who turned aside east of the Misty Mountains, and travelled down the River Anduin. The second, the Sindar, tarried in Beleriand seeking their lord, Elwë Singollo.

Got it? Unless you are a Silmarillion scholar (we prefer that term over “Tolkien freak”), you’d find it very difficult to begin any kind of activity based on the knowledge implicit in this one paragraph. For example: Draw a chart showing how the Vanyar, Noldor, Teleri, and Sindar are related. Name the most prominent Eldar of each people. Easy enough, unless you have no clue about the Noldor and the mess they got themselves and Middle-Earth into at the end of the First Age. (Bet you had no idea that Galadriel was an unrepentant rebel, and that’s why she’s still hanging around Lothlorien when Frodo shows up.)

So, let’s look at our Douglass book and how we need to think about getting the kids into it. Page one starts with his birth, his birthname, and the fact that he and his mother were slaves. He was “born a slave.”

Page two tells us that Douglass lived with his grandmother twelve miles away from the plantation. He saw his mother four or five times before she died when he was seven.

Page three: when he was six, his grandmother took him to the “big house” and left him, where he began his life of servitude.

Page four: we learn that slaves were beaten. When Douglass’s “own aunt Hester was tied to a hook and whipped,” he ran into a closet and hid.

There’s our first day of reading. What key context do we need to provide to students so that they can even suggest the obstacles Douglass had to overcome in his life?

Page 1

Posted on by Dale

Having selected David A. Adler’s Picture book of Frederick Douglass as our base text, I photocopied the pages and put them into a notebook. I’ve gone through every page, selecting vocabulary words; creating comprension questions; proposing activities for advanced/gifteed students.

On page one, we’re given his birthplace, his birthname (Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey), and the facts that he and his mother were slaves, while his father was an unknown white man, perhaps his owner, Captain Aaron Anthony.

Comprehension questions:

  • Why did he change his name?
  • What does “his first owner” mean?
  • Why doesn’t the book tell us his birthday?

Our lesson plan calls for the class to keep a chart of characters in our narrative, most of whom are mentioned only once. This page has Harriet Bailey, his mother; and Capt. Anthony, his first owner.

Activities:

  • Start the timeline with Douglass’s birth in 1818.
  • Show Maryland on the regional map. (Students have a regional map, a U.S. map, and a world map.)
  • Use an atlas to find where Talbot County is in Maryland, and show it on the map.
  • Use a chart showing the dates of the states’ admission to the Union and color in the states that were states in 1818.

We immediately have a problem, which I’ll talk about tomorrow.

Selecting a text

Posted on by Dale

Happy New Year!

You may recall that many of the biographies of Frederick Douglass I had been examining were too involved for 3rd graders to use as a text, especially since we had further plans to challenge them as readers with the article from the New York Times. I have gotten our choices down to two: Frederick Douglass: a photo-illustrated biography, by Margo McLoone (Capstone Press); and A picture book of Frederick Douglass, by David A. Adler (Holiday House).

The McLoone text is readable at a 2nd grade level and is illustrated on every lefthand page with a primary source photo or engraving. The righthand page is text.

The Adler text is illustrated on every page with color paintings that are not actually first-rate. The text is superimposed on the illustration, but is legible. Readability is probably at the upper end of 3rd grade.

I think I prefer the Adler text for a couple of reasons. First, the McLoone is very clunky, simply one declarative statement after another. Secondly, the Adler gives a much more comprehensive look at the society in which Douglass lived and the obstacles he overcame, which is of course our main point. Finally, the Adler uses quotes from Douglass himself, which would be easy to expand into a reading of the pertinent sections of Douglass’s autobiography.

The McLoone text might be useful as a remedial text for students whose reading skills are just not up to par.

The real curriculum

Posted on by Dale

The more I work on this Douglass project, and the deeper I get with my QCC/GPS comparisons, the more anxious I become to see the real curriculum, the thing we really have to teach, and by that of course I mean the CRCT [Criterion-Referenced Competency Test], because we won’t know what the state really wants to have happen in the classroom until we know what it is they’re generating standardized tests on.

They can give us interesting performance standards, suggested tasks, and examples of student work all they want, but if their CRCTs don’t reflect a performance-based instructional outlook, they’re not going to get that in the classroom. No one in his right mind would strike out into performance assessment knowing that students are going to be quizzed on discrete facts. And that’s a fact.

What’s unassessed is unaddressed… and vice versa.

Restating the question

Posted on by Dale

Every once in a while, I’ll restate our overriding question just to see if we’ve made any progress.

What is the role of the media center in the curriculum, especially the new GPS curriculum?

Last winter, the media specialists in Coweta County got some ideas together for a strategic plan for this issue. We didn’t get very far, but you can see what we did get here.

I think the most interesting part is on the Strategic Visions & Goals page. (Can anyone tell me why this process never went any further?) On that page, we defined our strategic vision of ourselves as media specialists in the following terms:

We see ourselves…

  • as teachers
  • as leaders in the new curriculum
  • as instructional consultants for our teachers
  • participating in the roll-out as partners in the curriculum design and implementation process
  • promoting reading in a variety of ways
  • designing level-appropriate research instruction
  • utilizing collaborative planning rubrics and assessment
  • bridging the gap between curriculum and information literacy

So… are we doing any of this yet? If you are, please take the time to share what you’re doing at your school. It helps to know that others are acting on our strategic vision of ourselves.

Some websites about performance standards and performance assessment

Posted on by Dale

On Wednesday the CLF is hosting an open house for the faculty here at Newnan Crossing. (It will be interesting to see if any of them don’t figure out that the Curriculum Liberation Front is just me…) I’ve done a nice brochure [PDF] to hand out, part of my general PR plan.

I’ve also thrown together some websites I’ve collected over the last year that deal with performance standards, performance tasks, performance assessment, etc. You can get to that at http://dalelyles.com/clf/perfstandards.htm.