Organizing the curriculum for teachers

As I have examined the Tennessee Standards and the Metro Nashville Standards for ELL, in addition to standards documents for music from several different states and at the national level, I've noticed lots of effort on the part of these curriculum developers to write guiding documents. Usually, these documents include standards (instructional goals, stated in non-behavioral terms), a scope and sequence (the big ideas or concepts that students are to learn in each grade level), and sometimes performance indicators (the instructional goals stated in behavioral terms, i.e. statements that tell us how we will know that a student reached the goal). However, I haven't yet seen a district-produced curriculum guide. This is a set of unit ideas or ways of organizing the big ideas and concepts into cohesive chunks. Teachers have to ultimately make these presentation decisions, and they are probably the most important of all.

Textbooks usually do this for teachers, if the teacher chooses to follow the textbook. However, in subjects where textbooks are not available, like some high school ESL courses, what is a teacher to do? We are leaving enormous amounts of planning and decision making about how to organize learning up to each teacher. We can only hope that the teachers have the time and energy to organize engaging units from the list of stuff students are to learn. We can only hope that teachers are well prepared enough in the frameworks of their teaching discipline to do this effectively so that students achieve. Isn't the point of the standards movement to help ensure instructional quality? Not only are the standards only as effective as the teachers who choose to read the standards and use them to guide their instruction, most district attempts to produce documents to guide teaching only go so far as to make lists of what students should learn and when. This is only half of what teachers need to know and do, if that. The rest of the teaching decision making process is in the grouping of ideas, the selection of activities, the facilitation of those activities, and the choices of how to assess.

If the standards movement is to truly impact education, curriculum directors must see their job as going further than producing these lists of what students are to learn. They must also come up with guides (not scripts, not mandates) for how teachers can teach these ideas well. This is what teachers search for the most. This is one of the main reasons why teachers need time to observe one another's classrooms: to get better teaching ideas. First, curriculum coordinators must find ways to get wide spread teacher buy-in and participation in order to make sure that teachers know very deeply what the standards documents contain. Then, curriculum directors must continue the effort by compiling a list of unit ideas, authored by practicing teachers, that make the standards, the scope and sequence, and the performance indicators COME TO LIFE in everyday teaching.