Revising Curriculum

Determining what needs to be improved in curriculum is a large task requiring not just theorizing and prioritizing of goals and objectives, but most importantly significant investment into teacher professional development. Significant curriculum improvements or changes that are not backed by ample PD are usually doomed. Many a standard and performance indicator have been written over the last two decades. If this type of curriculum planning alone could fix our lagging achievement scores from the local to the national level, this would already have happened. Instead, what we see are more and more standards, goals, objectives, etc., accompanied by NCLB-driven high stakes tests that attempt to drill these into the classrooms in a last-ditch effort. Where was the extensive investment into PD and teacher coaching? Where were the attempts to write standards that actually explicitly give teachers the ideas they need to improve instruction. I believe there is a very fine distinction that has not been well made in the standards movement: that specifying what students are to learn is not the same as helping teachers improve their practice!

Teachers need answers to questions like these if their instruction is to improve: What novels are good to teach for this age group? What theme should I plan my activities around? What presentation strategies best convey this idea to students? What kinds of projects best help students to demonstrate their knowledge on this topic? There is a large industry of practical guide books written for teachers by teachers. Sometimes one can find great answers to these questions in such books. However, if a teacher turns to the standards or SPI's for help with these basic, everyday questions that are the bread and butter of instruction, little help will be found. A teacher might see, "Students are to develop a basic vocabulary that includes cursor, software, memory, disk drive, hard drive, and CD-ROM," (Virginia Technology Standards grade 5). This gives no guidance to actual instruction; it only provides a list of words students are to know. The next critical questions are: How can I best teach these words for student mastery and skill development? What kinds of activities can I have students do? These questions should be addressed. To be sure, if a teacher was to merely "teach to the standards", or worse, "teach to the test", we might see a dismally boring classroom where students are memorizing such terms and definitions.

Thus, we should not be that surprised that the standards movement has not taken us where we want to go, or that has high stakes testing has not resulted in across the board improvements in learning. We will not see the kinds of improvements in learning that we want until we focus upon improving instruction directly instead of indirectly. The human factor of the teacher as intermediary between the curriculum standards and student learning must be better supported.

I see the job of a curriculum coordinator in a slightly different light than perhaps it has been seen traditionally. While of course such planning of standards, goals, objectives, and SPI's is a necessary part of the job, there is perhaps an even more important part that will be necessary if we are to truly see large gains in student achievement. That is this: teachers need better direct and indirect instruction strategies , better lesson plans, opportunities to receive coaching and to collaborate with one another, better lesson themes and projects, better learning activities and better assessment writing and grading. Strong teachers will be able to look at the standards and meet most of these needs. However, we must help all teachers in this task, while balancing the teachers' need for choice and autonomy.

Thus, the job of a curriculum coordinator, for example, only begins with the completion of a needs assessment and standards document. If should come as no surprise that simply handing this document to teachers and principals does not result in better teaching and learning (or "teaching to the standards"), and neither does providing textbooks and other materials, although that can help if the textbook is based on sound research and includes ample teaching ideas. It is in the teaching, coaching, and collaboration with teachers that curriculum improvements begin to take root. There is an intermediate step that is not necessarily obvious: teaching to the standards necessitates that teachers have better teaching ideas and materials. If these are not generated and introduced to teachers, teaching will occur as business-as-usual, and teachers will just check off the standards as an afterthought, not truly using them as an impetus for instructional improvement.