Washington Post: We Need Curric In A Box
Posted: January 4th, 2012 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 7 Comments »
From Jay Mathews at WaPo
Maybe Bruce Friedrich raised the lesson plan issue because he was so out of sync with the recent college graduates who were the other Teach for America instructors at his Baltimore high school. He was 40. He had switched to education after first running a homeless shelter and then working for animal rights.
He thought it was odd that despite the forward-looking reputation of the Baltimore district and Teach for America, beginning teachers still had to construct their lessons from scratch, as teachers have done for centuries. They were shown samples of the state tests their students would have to take. They were told where they might find good material. But as rookies, they had little idea which of a million possible options would work.
“There were no exemplary lesson plans, no recommended class activities, nothing,” he said.
Friedrich asked about this at every faculty meeting and every conference with his Teach for America adviser. He learned that many teachers, and the organizations that represent them, don’t want ready-made lesson plans. They feel it limits their creativity and turns them into robots doing whatever their department head or the district curriculum chief wants.
Friedrich began teaching in 2009 and had a splendid two years inTeach for America. His second year he was named the school’s outstanding teacher. But he still doesn’t understand why the district didn’t try to save him and other novices from many beginner’s mistakes by offering the best lesson plan possible for each subject.
Of course we at MATCH Teacher Residency have long been advocating for Curric In A Box. Since all the way back in 2010. Who can argue with this logic:
Like anything in a box, it’s supposed to be easier than stuff not in a box. Examples includeTree In a Box, NGO in a Box, and Bed In A Box.
Ross, while searching for a job, wrote:
Lots of MTT’s are motivated. We’re receptive to feedback. We’re ready to keep working 70+ hours/week to be good first-year teachers. But what should I be looking for from a school? Mike G. says a prepackaged curriculum* of ANY description would free up tons of hours so I’m not reinventing the wheel every week. What from the school is going to make this realfrigginbusy teacher a balanced and happier teacher?
And then this exchange in his comments section:
Jesse:
Prepackaged curriculum = my hell. yes, it frees up tons of hours a week, planning wise. no, it does not move my students. i’d rather put in the hours to create standards-aligned, kick-ass lesson plans that will actually HELP my students
Anon:
I echo the above. Planning (from scratch) helps you to internalize the material and wrestle with the thought processes that *your* students will have. “Curric in a box” does not encourage (and sometimes does not ALLOW for) responsiveness to how your students perform.
Total misunderstanding of what Ross and I mean by Curric In A Box. Ross explains:
Ross
Anon says curric-in-a-box will reduce my ‘making shit’ hours but make me more inflexible about differentiation and unable to enact pointed reflection. What if I took the 10? 20? hours per week of *making* lesson plans and cut that in half and dedicated that time to *changing* lesson plans?
Jesse:
So yes – i totally agree that u need to balance your life as a first year teacher (and you know i do). and if your school lets u “change” the curric in a box to make it work for you, by all means do it. first year (and 30 year) teacher motto is beg, borrow, steal – don’t reinvent the wheel. but if they don’t, and they want you to use the curriculum directly as its written…well then i say that curriculum isn’t going to help your students as much as your lesson plans would.
Hannah:
Okay, sure – a “curric in the box” that gives you no flexibility is no good. But as a first-year-teacher who received a well-thought-out, high-quality set of lesson plans, homeworks, vocab lists, etc from a 5-year+ “master teacher,” I can say that it is one of the greatest gifts I have ever received!
Obviously, being given a curriculum that is not standards-aligned or differentiated does absolutely nothing. But if you’re stepping into a “no-excuses” charter or similar, chances are there are quality lesson plans available from the former teacher. Even if you don’t take everything, think of the hour it would take to create a brand new vocabulary list, or a new set of comprehension questions for each night’s reading. Imagine if those were on a flash drive for your use at any time. Of COURSE you need to be allowed to alter and adapt your lessons to each year’s student body, and you can do that more and more as you become a more comfortable, confident, experienced teacher throughout the year.
But before that? If you have the option, find a job where you’ll be given a well-designed curriculum, and use it. Why pretend you’re going to re-invent the wheel better than someone who’s been perfecting the wheel for several years?
Out of college in 1991, I went to work for a couple of Broadway theater producers. In that world, Curric In A Box is not scoffed at. It’s celebrated. It’s called: a script. And few directors (teachers, of actors) find themselves inhibited. The artistry is in bringing a script to life.
Here is an awesome resource: great middle school math courses in a box compiled by BetterLesson.
Sadly, Jay did not link to the MTR music video on this topic. But it’s below and fantastic.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-6MZdToKwo
First, I agree that we teachers could really use a real, useful curriculum to work off of. I’ve put in a lot of time to seek out really solid resources to lean on for much of the day-to-day.
Second, here is a really smart (former) teacher who agrees: http://larkolicio.us/blog/?p=176
Third, we need to be thoughtful about how to share curriculum. Sharing documents? Not so useful. See a site such as BetterLesson where there are a TON of documents being shared — things like generic lesson plans and worksheets — but very few things that actually help me in the classroom. What would really help me is a curriculum that provides the following: a) some guidance on what makes the given lesson difficult for students, b) some things that I need to look out for when teaching, c) some alternatives in approaches, as well as a d) solid strategy or approach. These four items are, in my mind, the heart of a curriculum, and these tend to be obscured by lesson plans or (most) worksheets.
What I want is not a script, as in theater. What I want is a package of reliable strategies.
My life got so much better once I just started using Kaulani Ivory’s Sixth Grade Math Curric in a Box! Cut my planning time down to about a fourth of what it used to be.
I have come around to the curric in a box concept after having to spend thousands of hours my first few years teaching to create lesson plans. I actually love lesson design (I’m a bit of a geek for it). What needs to change to accommodate curric in a box is teacher training. Teacher training spends an inordinate amount of time on how to design high quality instructional lessons and units. Instead, it could be spent on how to recognize high quality instructional lessons and units, internalize them, and adapt them to your students’ needs.
If we think of teaching like acting, we can say that great lessons are like Shakespeare. Less then 1% of us can create such high quality. Teachers are the actors and we’ve all seen Keanu Reeves perform Shakespeare and Sir Laurence Fishburne perform it. The best teachers breathe life into lessons and tailor the delivery to their audiences tastes.
As a first year teacher, I completely agree that we need Curric in A Box. I teach seventh grade math, and it continues to astound me that I wasn’t handed a curriculum. How many times has seventh grade math been taught in the last two hundred years? I spend hours of time each night reinventing the wheel, creating resources from scratch for two different courses. I am very aware of the resources out there like BetterLesson, and I make use of them as much as I can. However, the time it takes to simply find what’s good in the enormous volume of resources available is huge. It is almost faster to just create it myself. And that’s often what I end up doing, even though I have very little experience making really awesome lessons. If I had a curriculum handed to me, yes I would spend time internalizing it, altering it, and making it my own. But that would take me far less time than creating two curriculums from scratch is taking me. I would be a much better teacher if I could spend all the time I now spend creating lessons doing other things for my students, like phone calls for example. Do I believe in phone calls? Yes. Do I have time to make any and also sleep? No.
I’m sympathetic to curricula in boxes for teachers who are new to their practice and are dealing w/ myriad overwhelming responsibilities simultaneously. I remember all too well my first couple years of teaching where I was leaning heavily on a colleague’s curriculum AND staying at work ’til 9pm because I was teaching myself how to teach it to others. You have to start somewhere, right? I get that.
So there’s nothing wrong w/ using someone else’ curriculum, but I argue it should be done w/ caution. We cannot satisfy ourselves w/ regurgitating someone else’s official knowledge — particularly if our goal as a teacher is one of social transformation rather than reproduction (which I imagine as urban ed types, we are).
Rather than teachers acting or authoring (as Rob suggests), let’s shift the emphasis to what the kids are doing. Let’s assume they are capable of critical interpretation and analysis, but that they need to be given space to do this sort of work. The aspiration, then, should be to push kids to interrogate the knowledge, question the source of it, the assumptions it makes, identify the absences.
(I recommend Eric Gutstein’s Reading and Writing the World with Mathematics to see how this can be done in practice. He outlines a social justice curriculum used with his urban middle school math students — building off concepts from a curriculum in a box, incidentally.)
I’ve become convinced of the need for Curric in a Box for teachers as well. A middle school science curriculum that I think MATCH should definitely look into is IQWST. It has reliable strategies like Michael P. advocates, is centered around students questioning like Chris K. advocates, identifies potential student misunderstandings, and is incredibly well organized. It is the most cohesive science curriculum I have seen, to date.
I am a first year teacher, and I LOVE my curric in a box. Am I spoiled by my curric? Yes. Am I a far happier, healthier human being because of it? Most definitely. I was lucky enough to stumble into a position vacated by the most organized 5th grade social studies teacher on the planet (I’ll call her M). When my veteran predecessor left unexpectedly, she bequeathed me an entire curriculum complete with assessments, projects, unit plans, weekly plans, and scripted daily lesson plans. Oh yeah, and power point presentations/SMARTboard files to go along with them. She is definitely my Shakespeare.
When I open up her lesson plans, I get a peek into the brain of a master teacher. I know, without doubt, that right now I would not be capable of constructing lessons that would match or exceed the quality of the ones I have been given. My kids benefit directly from M’s wisdom and experience, and so do I. When I do build my own lessons, I use her structure. Right now I’m in the guided practice phase of lesson planning, which I think is appropriate for a first year teacher who didn’t study education. Next year, I look forward to my independent practice- when I will take what I have learned from M’s lessons to build my own curriculum.
In addition to making my life easier, M’s lesson plans have given me the time to focus on other important aspects of first year teaching. I spend a lot of my prep periods tutoring kids one on one, or building relationships with the kids who are perpetually banned from gym class or electives. Instead of hiding in a supply closet or a stairwell designing lessons from scratch, I get to work with my kids outside of class, which is SO important when you teach 100 students.
All of this rambling really comes down to one thing: I <3 my curric in a box. I strongly believe that all first year teachers AND their students would benefit immensely if we all had our own curric Shakespeares to get us off on the right foot (Thanks, M!).