Having taught high school mathematics for the last 13 years, I have seen and participated in a wide variety of curriculum development activities and changes. When I first started, everything was being aligned to the Maine Learning Results, which we "unpacked" and carefully examined, finding important parts of our textbooks that dealt with each area, and creating numerous documents to support them. At the request of the State, we created "Common Assessments" meeting particular standards, learned how to co-grade them with common rubrics, and tracked each student over multiple years for each of the math standards addressed in the Learning Results. I remember a lot of file folders, and an entire file cabinet dedicated to this!
Then the State decided to eliminate this requirement of conversion to standards, and our district abandoned it. The state assessment at the high school level changed from the MEA's to the SAT's, which led to the adoption of a brand new textbook series on our part. We spent an entire summer aligning our text to the Maine Learning Results, and have a huge binder with the results of this endeavor.
Then the Common Core were officially adopted by the State of Maine. While there are many similarities with the Maine Learning Results, there are complete areas now abandoned, and other concepts included. For the last two years, we have been carefully and painstakingly examining how we measure up to the Common Core. Just this year, we have entered all our data about Content and Skills for each class we teach into Atlas, a curriculum mapping resource, and will add our Assessments next year. Almost all of our workshop days have been dedicated to this for these two years.
It has been both interesting and overwhelming. Much of the time, the process has seemed completely divorced from what I do daily in the classroom. I believe that documenting what I do, versus examining how to do it better, are two very different things, and look forward to this class immensely!
Wow! A very eloquent statement about the role of curriculum development in Maine schools the last few years. And at the risk of a time-worn cliche...too often we lose the forest for the trees when we respond to the latest mandate (Common Core, for example) instead of figuring out how the CC supports or does not support the responsive curriculum that each school is always improving.
ReplyDeleteEd,
ReplyDeleteFrom my recent conversation with my district's curriculum director, I do believe that I am at last beginning to gain an understanding of common standards, whether state or national. I have never "not" taught without someone telling me to examine the standards, to "unpack" the standards, to cover the standards. To me, they are a given (even though their form and content has changed somewhat over the years.) My curriculum coordinator has been teaching for the last 38 years. She remembers that when she first started, although she taught the students what she thought they needed, she was completely on her own. When Maine adopted its first set of standards, she and her fellow teachers saw them as a great resource; that finally, they had some targets for each grade level. She said it was like a sudden light!
I can appreciate them a little better now, but I still would like to know an awful lot more specifics at the high school level!