In Praise of American Educators by DuFour Richard;

Author:DuFour, Richard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Solution Tree
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The challenge for schools, of course, is to determine how to have the most powerful impact on the attained curriculum—what students actually learn.

• Study the intended standards together

• Agree on priorities within the standards

• Clarify how the standards translate into student knowledge, skills, and dispositions

• Establish what proficient work looks like

• Develop general pacing guidelines for delivering the curriculum

• Most importantly, commit to one another that they will, in fact, teach the agreed-on curriculum, unit by unit

Until Team Members Have Agreed on and Can Consistently Apply the Criteria They Will Use in Judging the Quality of Student Work, It Is Impossible for Them to Provide Students With a Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum

Consider the following statements from the CCSS for two different grade levels (NGA & CCSSO, 2010).

Grade 8: “Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, relevant descriptive details, and well-structured event sequences.” (p. 43)

Grade 12: “Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details, and well-structured event sequences.” (p. 46)

While eighth graders are to use relevant descriptive details, twelfth graders must use well-chosen details. Other than that less-than-informative distinction, the wording for the two grade levels is identical. Yet certainly, there should be different expectations regarding the writing of two groups of students years apart in their education. Every team must grapple with the question, What does proficient work look like for our students? Furthermore, once they have established their criteria for assessing the quality of student work, they must practice applying the criteria to samples of student work until they are confident they are providing students with consistent feedback. They should also be able to provide students and parents with clear illustrations of the different levels of quality work to help them understand the benchmark students are expected to achieve.

Creating a Viable Curriculum Will Require Educators Both to Assign Priority to Certain Standards and to Elect Not to Teach Other Standards

The fact that the American K–12 curriculum is overloaded, the proverbial mile long and half inch deep, is so well established that it has become a cliché. Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL) identifies 256 standards and nearly 4,000 benchmarks that states and national organizations had identified as essential. In estimating the time required to teach all that content, McREL concludes that the K–12 system would need to be converted to K–21 (Marzano, Kendall, & Gaddy, 1999). Although the number of standards may have declined since this study, American teachers continue to be asked to cover more topics than any other teachers in the world (National Science Board, 2004) at the same time that researchers find that trying to cover too many topics per grade has a decidedly negative impact on student learning (Schmidt & Houang, 2007). An NGA and CCSSO (2008) study criticizes state curriculum as little more than “a laundry list of topics resulting in too much repetition across grades” and a curriculum in which “you teach everything everywhere because then somehow somebody will learn something” (p.

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