The Brady Brothers Series: " Race to the Top"

Race to the Top: Passive or Active Learning

Race to the Top: The Unaddressed Problem

Race to the Top: Information Overload

Race to the Top: Looking at Standards

Race to the Top: To What End?

Download Connections: Investigating Reality

Can You Use Someone Else's Curriculum?

by Nicole Ouellette

My sister is an elementary school teacher. To me, that makes her an automatic saint, no documented miracles necessary.

She is also a young teacher in a small school and moves around grade wise: first rate last year, second grade this year, and third grade next year. I asked her about a recent teacher in-service day. "At least I got my math curriculum done," she said "you know, for the next teacher." And that got me to thinking about curriculums as usable documents.

Flashback to the experiences of my friends becoming teachers. Some entered classrooms where the retired teacher had left behind binders and file cabinets full of their "curriculum", presumably for them to use. Being young and overwhelmed, in the end most of it ended up being tossed out. On one hand, this is certainly a shame to have all that work gets thrown out but on the other, who wants to shift through someone else's organizational logic or stream of conscious thought? I certainly wouldn't.

To me the only way a curriculum is usable by more than one person is if it's very general and able to fit within a few typed pages. I would tend to look online for ideas for lesson plans but in general I want to plan on going to teach a concept myself. The fact that I would have to teach meteorology in April? No problem. The fact that I have to use what I think is your crappy lesson on clouds? Not so much.

(Come to think of it, all I wanted in the last school I worked in was to look at the school's curriculum and for two years I asked. I've still never seen it.)

Do any of your schools use a curriculum in a real way? If so how can we best share it amongst other teachers and with the public?

A Life Skills Curriculum

by Nicole Ouellette

In reading some other blogs, I came across a life skills curriculum outlined at one of my favorite blogs Cheap Healthy Good.

Normally source of good recipes and fun food commentary, one contributor decides to tackle how to teach useful skills to junior high/high school students.

As Home Ec and Life Skills programs get cut, I wonder how (or even if) schools are going to tackle teaching these skills.

Check out the 12 Week Life Skills Curriculum here. And the comments are as interesting as the curriculum!

Nicole writes a daily blog at www.breakingeveninc.com.

What can you learn from a lobster?

A few years ago I listened to a curriculum coordinator give an example of what not to do in the age of NCLB accountability. The story was that a teacher had been able to engage an otherwise unmotivated learner by connecting with his interest in lobstering. The student was "hooked" and excitedly researched everything he could find about lobsters. With this information, he made an incredible presentation, using a variety of tools while developing a rich set of skills in doing so. The point of the coordinator was that despite the impressive amount of learning that had taken place, this was not the content that needed to be covered according to the curriculum . . . and so the teacher was wrong in encouraging it.

What do you think?

What should curriculum contain?

Guide to Lobstering in Maine
Maine Lobster Industry
Maine Lobster
Lobster Institute
Wikipedia: American Lobster
Gulf of Maine: All about Lobsters

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