How to Read Your Curriculum Resources with a Critical Eye
Excerpt
In this excerpt from the first of four sessions of “Create Your Ideal Curriculum: Four Strategies for Preparing Engaging Instruction”, I offer a lens for analyzing educational resources and use a TCRWP Unit of Study as part of an example. The first full session was posted for paid subscribers, one session for the next four weeks.
Just as a pitcher can hold only so much lemonade, a unit or lesson template is limited in what it can contain with regard to instructional goals, outcomes, and tasks. It is similar to the constraints of our respective school years; we only have so much time, so we have to be judicious about the choices we make with what we allow in our classrooms.
With that, I’ll make a provocative statement here: you cannot teach all the standards. At least not well. Nor can you cover every lesson in the textbook. In fact, it’s not possible, even before the Common Core came out. In an analysis conducted by Robert Marzano, schools would have to expand from K-12 to K-22 to adequately cover all the content (Scherer, 2001).
So what do we hold on to and what do we let go of? In addition, what have we not yet considered in our changing times, yet should? These questions are at the core of our work. What makes it difficult is that a) there are so many choices, not just in standards but in curriculum resources and district/community expectations, plus b) the responsibility for what stays or what goes within the curriculum feels overwhelming.
A place to start is your district’s mission and vision statements. They typically describe an ideal state for a child’s education that most people can get behind (which is why they get adopted). The mission and vision of a district are also rarely implemented completely or delivered effectively via the curriculum (which is one reason why schools, teams, and teachers are often reluctant to share their curricula with others).
In Mineral Point Unified School District where I serve, this is our mission and vision:
Mission Statement: Grounded by our history, as one of the oldest publicly supported schools in Wisconsin, MPSD is the heart of a small community that educates and inspires our students for a bright future in a big world.
Vision Statements:
The Mineral Point School District will be a recognized leader in education.
Students will attain higher levels of academic achievement, resulting in greater lifetime opportunities.
Individualized learning will be embraced through innovation and technology.
The district will provide a collaborative and professional environment for teachers to learn and develop innovative instructional strategies.
Student learning will be enriched by cultivating family, community, and business partnerships.
The emphases are mine as I found them relevant for this work. This language gives me a lens to critically read current curriculum resources and standards. The mission and vision also provides “cover” for me when I would actually implement our more responsive and student-relevant curriculum, in the situation that someone would question it.
In addition, it may be helpful in having a detailed process for inclusion, selection, and omission of content, resources, and standards. As one possibility, Heidi Hayes Jacobs and Marie Alcock offer three questions that teachers and leaders can start using to comb through all we are tasked to implement (2017):
Contemporary: What do we need to create?
Classic: What do we need to keep?
Antiquated: What do we cut?
With the lens of the mission and vision plus the three questions as a process for rethinking what we teach and students learn, we can get started with a critical analysis of our curriculum resources.
Example: Analyze a TCRWP Unit of Study, “Building a Reading Life” (3rd Grade)
The Teachers College Readers & Writers Project (TCRWP), developed by Lucy Calkins and colleagues out of Columbia University, offers highly descriptive lessons and units of study for classroom instruction. I have observed success in classrooms where teachers have implemented this resource, especially in student literacy engagement.
However, no resource is perfect, and all the more reason to develop and manage our own curriculum. In observing this resource in action as well as reviewing one TCRWP unit of study (3rd grade reading, “Building a Reading Life”), I found two challenges:
There may be too many lessons.
Some of the texts utilized for teaching might need updating.
To help review this resource, I created a chart that would help organize one’s thinking and read with a critical eye.
This structure can help support a sort of dialogue with the developer of the resource. It puts us on a more even playing field professionally, where we are both experts in our given context: the authors in their study of the research and educational mandates, and us in our knowledge of the classroom, the context, and our students.
One of the first things I noticed in this resource is the inclusion of Stone Fox by John Gardiner as a primary text for teaching students how to build a reading life. It is a novel written in 1980, based on a legend of a boy, Little Willy, entering a sled dog race to win the cash prize and save his grandfather’s farm. A Native American (Stone Fox) serves as an adversary at first until Little Willy and his dog, Searchlight, prove their mettle.
In my research of the text, I did not find any glaring concerns about the cultural relevance of the text. However, I had a few questions as they related to our district’s mission and vision along with the three lens offered by Jacobs and Alcock:
Mission and Vision: Does a series of 19 lessons, all spelled out for the teacher and class, limit how students might lead their own learning as we prepare them for a “bright future in a big world”? Could we deviate from the script a bit and give kids more autonomy to make decisions in their lives in order to prepare them for life?
Contemporary, Classic, or Antiquated: The book Stone Fox may be antiquated. For example, Stone Fox as a character seems one-dimensional. There might be better literature out there that gives students more complex and more complete depictions of culturally diverse characters. Instead of Stone Fox, we could read aloud a series of picture books that offer multiple perspectives while still learning to build a reading life.
Next are my initial notes as I reviewed this curriculum resource.
Now try this process out for yourself. Click on the link below to pull up a template that will guide you to a) revisit your district’s mission and vision, b) consider the three lenses for curriculum renewal, and c) examine a curriculum resource you currently utilize when preparing instruction.
Critically Examine Your Curriculum Resource
References
Jacobs, H. H., & Alcock, M. H. (2017). Bold Moves for Schools: How We Create Remarkable Learning Environments. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
Scherer, M. (2001). How and Why Standards Can Improve Student Achievement: A Conversation with Robert J. Marzano. Educational Leadership, 59(1), 14-18.