I’ve been working up to this post for several weeks. I’ve examined knowledge, its organization, its origins, and its acquisition, as well as its relationship with opinion. I’ve grappled with skills and how they are acquired. And I’ve argued that “creativity” is not serial “making” but rather originality—something that school-aged children may build towards through knowledge and skill acquisition but are unlikely to master yet.
Those should be the goals of education. Students should acquire knowledge, learn how humanity acquires it–for example, through use of the scientific method and through historians’ analysis of primary sources—and learn to acquire it for themselves from credible sources—for example, through research projects. They should learn to express opinions constructively, to justify and critique opinions on the basis of credible evidence, and to reconsider and modify opinions—for example, through argumentative writing and debate activities.
They should grow skills, including some that everyone must have, like writing well and performing mathematical operations up to a certain level, and some that they chose for themselves, like artistic or athletic skills. And they should have opportunities to explore areas of achievement—for example, through “arts wheels” and perhaps an athletics equivalent—to broaden their choice of what to pursue. Most importantly, as they grow skills, they should learn how to grow skills. They should be able to keep growing them, and keep growing their knowledge, once they no longer have teachers on hand to help them.
And, of course, they should learn “social” or “life” skills from good manners to how to shake someone’s hand to how to dress for a formal event. Some will learn this sort of thing mostly from their families, but others will need more help from their teachers.
That’s my broad outline of what students should learn—in educator speak, the “learning objectives” for the whole of a child’s education from their first day at pre-school to their last day at high school. But how should we determine the learning objectives for each year and each class, not to mention the literature and learning activities that will help students to meet them? These should be developed “at the ground level” by small groups of teachers. They should not be developed at the state level, with endless “stakeholders” each having their say, not to mention the ten grubby little cents’ worth of elected officials and political appointees who want to use schools to achieve political ends. That sort of approach leads to bloated sets of standards that function as little checkboxes that must be met in some minimal fashion—a distraction from overarchingly important goals like, say, whether a child can read and understand a whole novel and discuss and write about it in an analytical way.
Compare the byzantine 200-page document with which my own state—Florida—attempts to guide the teaching of my own subject—English, with the more reasonable set of standards created by the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association[1]. The letter has twelve learning objectives that fully encompass what students need to cover to become skilled readers, writers, speakers, and interpreters of English. They do not break these standards down into several dozen or several hundred micro-standards for children of different ages, like the Florida standards do, and nor should they. That should be left to teachers in each school, who know where their students are coming from—their cultural and socio-economic background and their prior preparation—and what advantages and obstacles they face in their learning.
Of course, teachers might benefit from outside perspectives, such as professors of their various subjects, engineers, doctors, and other high-level users of science and mathematics, journalists and other professional writers, who could help with writing standards, and perhaps leaders of businesses and other kinds of employers, who could help teachers to understand what their students might need for the work world. But these people should not sit on or even advise unwieldy committees creating unwieldy sets of standards. Instead, at the behest of perhaps governments, perhaps school accrediting bodies, perhaps professional associations for educators, they should write articles or participate in interviews, which could even be mandatory reading or viewing for teachers engaged in the curriculum writing process.
What process should teachers go through when creating a curriculum? First, they should create “scope and sequence” documents for their subjects, which should indicate the major learning objectives for each year and each aspect of the subject. It does not need to be overly detailed. For example, the scope and sequence that I work from, for fifth through eighth grade English, and which I created with the other English teacher at my school, consists of a single table with a row for each grade level and a column for each of reading, writing, writing mechanics, vocabulary, and public speaking. It runs to three-and-a-half pages and less than nine-hundred words.
External standards such as those of the National Council of Teachers of English / International Reading Association may help with the creation of a scope and sequence. Extravaganzas like the State of Florida’s will not.
Of course, teachers creating scope and sequence documents for each subject should swap notes, as many important skills appear in more than one subject.
On the basis of the scope and sequence documents, teachers should then create learning objectives for each of their classes. My classes have between six and ten learning objectives. These should inform choices of materials and learning activities, and these should be documented, along with the learning objectives, in a curriculum document for each class. As with the scope and sequence, there’s no need to go overboard with detail, especially as teachers will need to make a lot of adjustments on the fly. Two or three pages is perfectly adequate for a curriculum document.
This work should be done before the start of a school year, and should be revised before the start of every subsequent school year. As many teachers should be involved as possible, as involvement can earn buy-in. Larger schools, with larger departments, may need department chairs to coordinate the process and, when disagreements drag out, either take votes or make executive decisions. Smaller schools should be able to be less formal.
The whole process should not take more than a day in the first year and a couple of hours in subsequent years. This should minimize the sulkiness of teachers who think that any kind of meeting is an imposition on their time, even when what they are being asked to do is a worthwhile investment in a curriculum that works in a considered way towards considered goals.
To summarize my thoughts, curriculum writing (1) should be done by teachers, (2) should create a few short and simple documents, which teachers can refer to throughout the school year, and (3) should not take a great deal of time. I believe that curriculums written in this way will raise educational standards by setting credible goals that teachers know well and can focus on in a meaningful way, and that provide meaningful challenges for students.
[1] Florida’s B.E.S.T Standards: English Language Arts: https://www.fldoe.org/core/fileparse.php/7539/urlt/elabeststandardsfinal.pdf
NCTE / IRA Standards for the English Language Arts: https://ncte.org/resources/standards/ncte-ira-standards-for-the-english-language-arts/
You can also find the NCTE and IRA’s explanation of their standards in a downloadable document at this URL.
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