Okay, so, the timing for this unit is either really good or really bad; I can't decide which.
Last week at school we did a PD on curriculum mapping, followed by a couple of days of applying that, and I can't help but think how useful this information would have been for me going in. Of course, I knew at the beginning of the week what this module would be on and what the PD would be on, and the PD didn't start until Wednesday, so, um...., the ball was really in my court for making a better choice. No?
Anyway...
The lesson on Unpacking a Standard was, I think, particularly useful in the scheme of things. The idea of big questions and how to break a standard into its skills, concepts, and questions is pretty fascinating to me. It makes me think about how we are trying to get students to a place of "literacy" which essentially means they can sit down and read anything they like and get themselves worked into a froth about purpose and audience and motivations and imagery and all that; yet, we still need this type of focused instruction just to read a sentence that tells us how to do our jobs. It's a little mind-blowing, but it's essentially true. The level of literacy that can be taught in a broad, public education system is simply the level that one needs to get through a regular day, make good decisions based on the information around one, and snuggle up with a worthwhile book at the end of it all. Everything beyond that is specialized, industry-specific literacy, which doesn't exist in any meaningful way outside of the industry we find ourselves slaves to. In many ways, what we're teaching is how to approach a difficult task without just throwing your hands up in the air and shaking your head, like high school students tend to do when they first sit down with Hamlet. We're teaching that skill of trusting that the thing we're looking at makes sense, and that the responsibility to make it comprehensible is on our shoulders. Each of these ELA standards, to some degree, says, "Look at something you don't know how to do, check in with the things you DO know how to do, and gain the skills to bridge that gap." But, I digress...
This simple activity of unpacking a standard is going to be incredibly useful in my teaching and curriculum-mapping life. And I'm pretty confident now that I know how it's done.
Backwards mapping makes perfect sense, when you think about it. When I first started teaching English (in the long, long ago of last year), my primary thought when I was determining what to teach was, "What do I want these students to experience?" I wrote lesson plans, and then almost made my brain explode trying to force standards in where they belong. Some of them were hit over and over again, while some were penciled in with targeted lessons at the end of the quarter that didn't connect to anything else we were doing. We covered some cool stuff, but students weren't getting out of that stuff what I anticipated they'd get out of it. They weren't meeting the standards because, while I expected the standards to be met, I wasn't teaching the standards. I could still apply this more consistently in my planning, and I will continue to improve, but in the meantime, I'll tweak it where I can to make it as much like Backwards Planning* as possible.
*I'd really prefer "Backward Planning" if anyone cares. Having grown up in a backwards little town in the foothills of the Ozarks, and struggling every day to be as little backwards as possible, the word has some connotations for me.
Writing SMART objectives is also something I'm sure I'll benefit from. Going back to that same distant last year (in the long, long ago), I often found that I really had no way to measure progress toward the goals I was setting. I guess starting with measurable goals would have gone a long way toward solving the problem. This is going to help me to build much better lessons.
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