Quality communication, curriculum renewal, coordination among the body of educators – all of these are the ideals teachers yearn for, and which Heidi Hayes Jacob believes are tenable when teachers commit to the when that is implicit in calendar-based curriculum mapping. What she says about the walls that exist between teachers who share one building, and the essential disjunction between primary and secondary schools, seems accurate to me. In my school, team teaching was suggested and adamantly opposed; if I survey my students’ long term curriculum map, it looks rather like a dilapidated old road to me (like Fortification Street here in Jackson, overrun with treacherous potholes and neglect).
Jacobs reaches for simplicity to resolve this unwieldy dilemma. Will a calendar prove to be the harmonious, flexible, welcoming endeavor she illustrates? In my own school district, at my own campus, vertical mapping is completely nonexistent, while horizontal planning has gone up into flames. The two freshman English teachers resigned at Christmas break (before then, 9th and 10th grade English instructors haphazardly planned together); now there is little budding in relationship to the new teachers, who have stepped into a chaotic world and are scrambling to just survive it. To be well-planned and coordinated with other levels and subjects? That’s what teachers do in heaven! they likely think.
In JPS, we have a district-created pacing guide. It has one column for dates, one for objectives to master, and one for suggested resources. It spreads the objectives (skills) out like tomato-paste on a pizza crust over the year, divided into neat two-week chunks. Indeed, I have always viewed this document as, as Jacobs articulates, “rigid and lock step …giving the impression that all is under control” (2). It really does feel lie a “lifeless inventory of isolated skills,” whereas a calendar-based curriculum map should really be like a skeleton, giving structure and movement and strength to the “skill sets” we’re to deliver.
After reading Jonathan Kozol’s Letters to a Young Teacher, I became more convinced than ever that the unquestioning submission to the “objectives-tacked-to-a-date” (that is, pacing guide) approach to curriculum mapping knocks the joy out of learning for students. Kozol suggests that teachers post the objectives but keep teaching in a passionate way whatever it is that her students are ready for, regardless of the pacing guide’s lifeless strictures. He goes so far as to implore new teachers to withstand irrational insistence on following such a verbose bureaucratic document which complicates simple lessons children must learn: to read and to write. For Kozol, planning and mapping are just that simple – more simple than Jacobs’ calendar. And yet, I have trouble denying that he would discourage the intentional big-picture preparation that calendar mapping would hopefully produce.
I think the pacing guide ought to be renamed the SATP calendar (state tested subject areas), which map out what students ought to be covering every year in the four core subjects, from 7th-12th grade. Currently, there is too much spontaneity and repetition in the solo approach to curriculum mapping (each teacher to her own). Without merging different subjects together, cantankerous departments that do not work well with each other split into solo-mode, at the cost of not just horizontal but also vertical mapping. If teachers across subjects could plan together, I believe less personality clashes between small departments would occur, thereby determining mapping failures.
My plan for planning the summer 2009 English I and II class is to adopt some of the strategies second-years last year used- i.e., one block per day devoted each to one of the three English competencies in the framework (literature, grammar and essay writing). But I would like to integrate the syllabus by centering it around a novel study, of Sandra Cisneros’ House on Mango Street. I taught it this fall and it was effective for capturing such a large potion of the skills, and the students responded positively to it. Pitfalls I forsee is me being too domineering in having my way in the planning. I don’t want to force my co-teachers to teach a book they hate! And I know that I am setting mysef up for disappointment if I get too attached to a particular plan too early, without trying to align myself first. Also, I think it will be hard to get ourselves to vertically integrate with other subjects, or to connect to the lower and higher level English classes. It can be done, however; thus, it is now an ambition of mine, since Jacobs suggests that such exchanges breeds renewal in the (caliber and rigor of the) content, quality in teacher communication (especially integral in our cooperative –teaching/group planning approach at the MTC summer school!), and efficiency (synonym, productivity?) in scaffolding/building students’ skills.
Works Cited
Jacobs, Heidi Hayes. "The Need for Calendar-Based Curriculum Mapping." Mapping the Big Picture:Integrating Curriculum and Assessment K-12.
Kozol, Jonathan. Letters to a Young Teacher. New York: Random House, 2007.
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