Let’s get everyone on the same page…
Let’s get everyone on the same page…
The trend in my small California school district over the past seven years has been to direct instruction from the top down. It’s called standardization and it’s national mantra under “No Child Left Behind.” The district chooses a curriculum series text, whatever strand, via a committee of teachers and administrators from those adopted from the state of California. Then everyone goes through some degree of training, before implementation, then everyone is supposed to do the same thing, at about the same time, covering the appropriate ground, thus advancing on the state tests. Or so they say, I think I got out of elementary school just in time to save my sanity.
When I began my second career, I was a thirty-six year old novice teacher. My first teaching position was supposed to be a 1st/2nd combination class in a very small, neighboring, agricultural community. I had beautiful back-roads, no traffic commute. A week before school started was told that my 1st/2nd combination class was now a 2nd/3rd with twenty-five boys and six girls.
The commute was a great time to review my plans for the day on the way to school and a great time to review the outcome on the ride home. It was an interesting time in primary education because the pendulum in reading instruction had just swung from phonics to whole language in California. I joined a primary staff that had no idea what they were supposed to do with whole language and was reluctant to give up their step-by-step phonics based approach. I had no idea what to do either, but one look at the old material told me that with twenty-five boys and six girls, I was bound to kill off many beginning readers if I didn’t figure out a better approach.
I learned three aides to reading instruction my rookie year. The first I began as a way to wind down after a rousing lunch recess; reading aloud. Reading aloud is a great way to keep beginning readers involved in the process as they are moving from simple material they can read on their own to interesting stories that they can understand but can’t quite handle reading silently by themselves. We tried several books before we hit on “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” series by C.S. Lewis. We spent many a fall day right after lunch under a big tree. The kids were mesmerized by those books and never wanted to stop.
Looking for a way to keep everyone’s attention as we moved into the holiday’s I decided to do a class play. We performed “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” this began a tradition of performing two plays a year, one right before the holidays and one before the end of the school year. I remember one reluctant reader in particular. Mom reported back after Christmas break that the only thing her son did all vacation was to organize the neighborhood kids into casts of the Wizard of Oz. She was amazed at his reading progress from the time we started the play. He came back from vacation reading and highly motivated. The constant repetition required to master the lines of the play is a great aide to the improvement and fluency of reading.
But the best thing I learned I stumbled onto by total accident. Our little school put on a Christmas program that involved learning a number of songs. The primary group got together every afternoon in the library to learn the songs. The words to the songs were printed on large sheets of tag-board, the kids followed along as a teacher pointed out the words. This process evolved into my primary whole language teaching method. Kids love to sing songs over and over, giving the needed repetition found in parent’s reading the same favorite books over and over to their young children, the basis for the whole language instruction. Over the next five year’s using pocket charts and song evolved into a major component of my whole language reading program, especially as I moved back down to 1st/2nd combination classes.
None of these methods was found in a teacher’s guide, because I have never used a teacher’s guide in my career. I have always looked at my class on the one hand and the grade level curriculum on the other and figured a way to join the two. I have also learned that what works well with one class will not necessarily work with another. I know that my way of instruction can‘t be boiled down, distilled and bound in a curriculum guide. Not unless you bind me with it.
Any curriculum approach begins with somebody’s ideas, and hopefully applied to somebody’s real class. How that can ever translate into a curriculum that I can use effectively is beyond me. But our federal government, state government and school districts have bought into the idea of standardization. That means the classroom teacher is just a cog in the big wheel of education. If the teacher follows the manual, the student’s will learn and become great little test takers. But is that really our goal in education? I believe students receive a much richer education progressing through a series of creative teachers in elementary school, each one teaching from their strengths. One might have a flare for science, another for math, the next for drama, but it’s the excitement that the students pick up on and their teacher’s love of learning.
Standardization guarantees that all teachers will be mediocre. Everyone following the same manual with no time left for anything creative. I suppose in the short term it might raise specific test scores, but what harm are we doing in the process?
The trend in my small California school district over the past seven years has been to direct instruction from the top down. It’s called standardization and it’s national mantra under “No Child Left Behind.” The district chooses a curriculum series text, whatever strand, via a committee of teachers and administrators from those adopted from the state of California. Then everyone goes through some degree of training, before implementation, then everyone is supposed to do the same thing, at about the same time, covering the appropriate ground, thus advancing on the state tests. Or so they say, I think I got out of elementary school just in time to save my sanity.
When I began my second career, I was a thirty-six year old novice teacher. My first teaching position was supposed to be a 1st/2nd combination class in a very small, neighboring, agricultural community. I had beautiful back-roads, no traffic commute. A week before school started was told that my 1st/2nd combination class was now a 2nd/3rd with twenty-five boys and six girls.
The commute was a great time to review my plans for the day on the way to school and a great time to review the outcome on the ride home. It was an interesting time in primary education because the pendulum in reading instruction had just swung from phonics to whole language in California. I joined a primary staff that had no idea what they were supposed to do with whole language and was reluctant to give up their step-by-step phonics based approach. I had no idea what to do either, but one look at the old material told me that with twenty-five boys and six girls, I was bound to kill off many beginning readers if I didn’t figure out a better approach.
I learned three aides to reading instruction my rookie year. The first I began as a way to wind down after a rousing lunch recess; reading aloud. Reading aloud is a great way to keep beginning readers involved in the process as they are moving from simple material they can read on their own to interesting stories that they can understand but can’t quite handle reading silently by themselves. We tried several books before we hit on “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” series by C.S. Lewis. We spent many a fall day right after lunch under a big tree. The kids were mesmerized by those books and never wanted to stop.
Looking for a way to keep everyone’s attention as we moved into the holiday’s I decided to do a class play. We performed “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” this began a tradition of performing two plays a year, one right before the holidays and one before the end of the school year. I remember one reluctant reader in particular. Mom reported back after Christmas break that the only thing her son did all vacation was to organize the neighborhood kids into casts of the Wizard of Oz. She was amazed at his reading progress from the time we started the play. He came back from vacation reading and highly motivated. The constant repetition required to master the lines of the play is a great aide to the improvement and fluency of reading.
But the best thing I learned I stumbled onto by total accident. Our little school put on a Christmas program that involved learning a number of songs. The primary group got together every afternoon in the library to learn the songs. The words to the songs were printed on large sheets of tag-board, the kids followed along as a teacher pointed out the words. This process evolved into my primary whole language teaching method. Kids love to sing songs over and over, giving the needed repetition found in parent’s reading the same favorite books over and over to their young children, the basis for the whole language instruction. Over the next five year’s using pocket charts and song evolved into a major component of my whole language reading program, especially as I moved back down to 1st/2nd combination classes.
None of these methods was found in a teacher’s guide, because I have never used a teacher’s guide in my career. I have always looked at my class on the one hand and the grade level curriculum on the other and figured a way to join the two. I have also learned that what works well with one class will not necessarily work with another. I know that my way of instruction can‘t be boiled down, distilled and bound in a curriculum guide. Not unless you bind me with it.
Any curriculum approach begins with somebody’s ideas, and hopefully applied to somebody’s real class. How that can ever translate into a curriculum that I can use effectively is beyond me. But our federal government, state government and school districts have bought into the idea of standardization. That means the classroom teacher is just a cog in the big wheel of education. If the teacher follows the manual, the student’s will learn and become great little test takers. But is that really our goal in education? I believe students receive a much richer education progressing through a series of creative teachers in elementary school, each one teaching from their strengths. One might have a flare for science, another for math, the next for drama, but it’s the excitement that the students pick up on and their teacher’s love of learning.
Standardization guarantees that all teachers will be mediocre. Everyone following the same manual with no time left for anything creative. I suppose in the short term it might raise specific test scores, but what harm are we doing in the process?
posted by Gary at 1:32 PM
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