Things I hear…

October20

When everything new seems like something old, sometimes it isn’t…

You should go in and observe teachers with seniority, not new teachers, because when I talk to them, they are very excited about being able to teach again and not just work from a textbook
-paraphrasing comments at October 17th Sacramento City Unified School District board meeting on the instructional changes happening with Common Core

This is just like when I was starting teaching, and we were doing thematic units, etc., but the thing was we really didn’t have lesson plans like we are being asked to write now, because we were all kind of inventing this type of instruction – Colleague talking about the old days of teacher designed curriculum, and why it was less work then, and an awful lot to do now

I don’t mind changing lesson plans to match the new standards. I’ve done this before, but in the past, they gave us materials to work from – Another colleague concerned about creating curriculum from scratch

No one is happier than me to see the death of the over-reliance on direct instruction curriculum, but I’m wondering if half of us implementing Common Core are following a scripted model and state-set teaching modules  (New York), and the other half are embracing teacher created units of study, where is this all going to end up? My fear is that if the teacher created path fails, it will be because it’s been poorly planned (no plan, changing plan, I’ve seen it all), not because it’s a bad idea or it can’t be done. If it fails, I fear we’ll be stuck with publisher directed instruction — not just texts or curriculum– for the foreseeable future. That will be just one more step on the path of de-professionalizing our profession.

One Comment to

“Things I hear…”

  1. October 21st, 2013 at 7:39 am      Reply Jon Halvorsen Says:

    Teachers must energize and get involved now or we may suffer a different form of the same failed policies….focus more on assessment versus instruction and developing students creativity and passion for learning. The Common Core Standards are more similar to the format of instruction taking place in Tahoe Truckee Unified School district when I began teaching here 17 years ago. So, I’m excited about the change and I think this shows that the pendulum is swinging back in the right direction now that parents see the fallacy of the NCLB-standardized testing generation. That said however, as teachers we can not be fooled into thinking that the corporate for profit interests and those who wish to destroy public education have gone away. We must stay vigilant and develop our own curriculum that we know will excite students or companies like Pearson will be glad to funnel it down to our schools in exchange for billions of dollars.


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