The Connected Curriculum - Challenge #21

Who Should Define Curriculum?

I believe that curriculum must be defined by individual school districts, but guided by the State Standards.  Although I don’t feel as if the State should have a complete say over what exact curriculum should be taught in our schools, I do feel they need to set a minimal “standard” of what skills should be met in each subject and at what grade level those skills should be introduced.  In a narrowly defined definition, I would look at curriculum as a packaged program that a school purchases to be used by their teachers to direct specific classrooms.  More broadly defined, curriculum would be this definition plus the added detail that the State is responsible for shaping the path of that curriculum.  In black and white, our state is not “responsible” for defining what specific curriculum we use but if we fail to meet their standards by not following an effective curriculum we look at a large list of possible consequences.  Funding can be lost or cut, the school can be labeled a PLAS (Persistently Low Achieving School), staff can be let go, and the list goes on. Standards hold us accountable as teachers and as a school district and I believe that is the way it should be.  

At our school, curriculum is viewed as established academic standards/objectives that are to be taught with the method of delivery left up to the teacher.   These standards serve as a gauge of where the students should be within a distinctly defined continuum of learning. As a teacher I frequently plan “scope and sequence” frameworks for my individual courses, but I also believe that as teachers, if we follow the child, there can be no truly set order. Focusing on the learning needs of every single child and designing curriculum to meet those needs requires our education systems to simultaneously safeguard that students meet the standards of the past but also asks that they be innovative in the design of 21^st century learning skills. As a technology teacher, and with those skills in mind, I argue that teachers must undertake a greater responsibility for all the things that a student might acquire in the school and away from the school. The teacher-led curriculum must integrate and make meaning with what students learn in their everyday experiences.   As we create individual goals for our classes, we must also create tools to help us reach those goals.  The same representation, of course, should then be employed on the students—we should help them reach clearly defined goals (standards) and we should teach them ways to become learners and problem solvers in the design of their own learning (real life experiences). We can do this as teachers by fine tuning the established curriculum to one that pushes students to learn and make connections to personal experiences. In this day and age, the pace of technological change is very swift. When crucial daily tools can change in just five years, the impact over longer stretches can be intense.  Those trends have prompted some educational leaders to argue that the long-established curriculum is not enough: schools must offer students a broader set of "21st Century Skills" to succeed in a rapidly evolving, technology-drenched world. We should make a serious effort to understand the best practical evidence on what skills will be essential for students to succeed in careers and personal lives, and we should communicate that information in clear and concrete ways that make sense to the students.  Simply asking teachers to address a long list of defined skills (State Standards) will not be sufficient as we continue to progress into the future.
 

Until tomorrow...

Collaborate and connect your curriculum!