Curriculum
Recently I was part of a meeting with teachers who were developing units based on the Understanding by Design model. This group of teachers had a range of experiences, from beginner to veteran. Up until this particular meeting, I had not been involved in curriculum development or unit design. I strongly believe that I should be involved in these processes, so I was happy to be at the meeting. I went in not really knowing what to expect, so I initially just observed what these teachers were doing.
Here is what I noted: (1) The work they were doing and the processes that they were following were really reinforcing a didactic approach to teaching. All of the talk going on was centered around the teacher being the expert in the classroom, feeding knowledge (and understanding, so they thought) to students. (2) This unit design seemed to be aimed at what I will call an ‘idiot’ teacher - one who is lacking in the knowledge of their content area. These units were being written so specifically that anyone could read the document and know exactly what to do - what activities to arrange and what materials to use. My question was this - Are teachers really that limited to need this sort of step-by-step guide to teach? The responses I got were something like, “Well, we’re just doing this because we have to.” “Nobody will ever look at this.” “Nobody really knows where we are going with this.” ...and on and on.
The unit design following the Understanding by Design model is not a bad thing in and of itself. What was the problem here? The fact that the underlying definition of learning was the same old, same old. No wonder these teachers saw this as just more of the same, only packaged a little differently. Nobody was being stretched to rethink their ideas of learning and use this unit design process as an opportunity to slowly retool themselves for a change in classroom practice. Shall I put it more bluntly? Nobody was there challenging, in a productive way, their mental models of effective instruction.
I do think there are an overwhelming number of teachers who view their role as the sage-on-the-stage. Too many classrooms are passive, lacking in creativity and are content driven, not student centered. And technology is typically forced into these less-than-effective models. This certainly wasn’t a forum to get any discussion going on using technology in a fundamentally different learning environment. So my contribution for the day was to focus on digital content: video streaming resources and interactive web resources that could be used in the various unit designs that they were developing.
How do we make the change, especially in this type of environment? I think I have some ideas....more to come.
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