The whole "disciplines dilemma" and the lack on our part to adequately prepare students for future employment is something I've thought about a lot. How do we create real world curriculum a;; of the time? It's exhausting!! But, good for kids . . . However, those other countries are not doing projects in the community, they are generally doing the oldest of old school intensive rote memorizing, drill work. So why are they successful? Does it have anything to do with that "easy to teach kids" vs. "hard to teach kids" thing. Maybe the kids in the other countries that are doing well are the "easy to teach", "wanting to succeed" kids. If we tested only those kids in our country, how would we fair? I would like to see a study looking at those specific kids because, I'm still not convinced we'd do so well. I love teaching an integrated or even integrative curriculum and think it's the only way to get to our hard to teach kids. But, are our easy to teach kids done a disservice by not being taught like the rest of the world, or even like a lot of our highest level private schools that service the elite in our country? I don't know??
The whole "backwards design" movement is so interesting to me. I am sure that one of the reasons I teach the way I do is because of the focus on this method of teaching but, to me, it just seems natural. I don't think I ever finished all of the Backward Design or Universal design literature I was supposed to at one point or another but, I still teach that way because to me, it makes so much sense! I don't know how else I would teach! You pick what you want (or what the kids want or need) to get out of a unit, identify some ways to measure this, and then figure out what needs to be taught and how it should be presented. There have been a few times when I have had something I wanted to do with students, a documentary or something, and then looked for targets to match my idea for a project, but generally I find the backwards design model to make a lot of sense.
In regards to curriculum integration, I guess I am stuck on the fact that right now, I am teaching within a discipline centered, standards based, common assessment focused, text book driven system. I struggle everyday with how to merge those realities with the ideals of Beane and others like Gert Nesin, Mark Springer, and folks like Gayle Andrews. Maybe I am just not brave enough but, I think I am where a lot of teachers who have been exposed to this philosophy are. I am pushing against the established norms but, I don't know how to push harder and more importantly, how to push harder and be successful. In my district, the kids are pretty attuned to the whole "school game". When I have tried to do more integrative things, my biggest struggle has been getting the kids on board. Most eventually come along, but there are some, mostly those "easy to teach" "high achieving" kids I mentioned above, that push back against me. Now, I know that a big problem is my inability to take criticism (a fault I really need to work harder on), but it is difficult, especially for a relatively young, new teacher.
Andrews and others don't address this problem, or not as far as I have read, in their work and this is what's most frustrating. Schools like Maranacock and others are fully incorporating these models successfully but, they are doing so with full support from administration and (I'm totally assuming here) others involved in policy making in their respective districts. I have some of that support, but feel like I lack full institutional support to do these things.
I guess I would really just like to figure out where to go from here. If the answer truly is, "Just go for it," than I guess my first step should be to toughen up rather than to continue to look for resources to help me out! There's certainly a lot to think about . . .
I totally agree with you that this backwards planning just makes sense. We have talked about the lack of middle school teacher preparation courses. One thing I will say about my K-8 courses are that they taught us to prep like this. We had to create a couple units throughout the 4 years and before we started any lessons we had to establish what all students were going to get out of the unit.
ReplyDeleteYou are not alone with the struggle of the "easy to teach kids" or their parents for that matter. We are doing a large integrated unit of energy that is very student led. The student's who had the hardest time were those "easy to teach kids" because they wanted to know exactly how they would be graded and what we expected from them (we had them create their own rubrics). I can't say that I blame them, I still do the same thing to Ed. I do think though that this is a entirely new approach to school for students and it hopefully eventually they will see the benefits of it (and how they are really being challenged more this way). Good luck!