Week 5- What is?

I have to admit, after my last experience with chapter 1 one, I was skeptical about what the book had in store next. To my surprise, I enjoyed this chapter. Chapter 2 hit on some important points of a process that KPS is currently undertaking.

We are in our first year of a standards based assessment curriculum. This means that we are using various theories from Dr. Robert J. Marzano, understanding by design, and differentiated instruction. All are good and confusing at times when applying them or explaining them to outsiders.

This chapter did a great job explaining the process that I have used to write my current curriculum. The use of analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation is exactly the process we use. Do we have the time to continue this as we teach it, no, but we are going to re-evaluate using these tools at the end of this school year.

Each portion of the process, as explained by the authors, is what is occuring within my district. If you look at the characteristics of Instructional Design, you will see all the components that we have implemented. We are goal orientated, learner centered, focusing on meaningful performance, measurable outcomes, being empirical/iterative/self-correcting, and working as a team. These facts are hard to ignore as I go through the process of curriculum writing.

The hardest thing to ignore by many is the paradigm shift that needs to occur. It is so difficult to be a learner who assists other learners. Writing curriculum for that is even more difficult because many text books brag about their abilities to do this but in reality they are only supposed to be guides or supplementals. What is going to help us in the long run is the data and that is the heart of the ID process.

Data will break down paradigms, data will show parents what their students need to focus on in their learning, data will create support for teachers in difficult situations, data will be empirical, data will drive learning and show direction. Without data, the process is useless and support will be nonexistent. Data is the motivator and it has no idea what it has started.

I am going to present at the MCSS this year about writing the assessment based curriculum for 9th grade World History. If you are interested in my presentation, I have a rough draft of my powerpoint. Just drop me a note and I can forward it to you.