follow-up: teaching

[winterbadger]

One of the responses in the thread about studying history included this statement:

The last thing a great teacher wants to do is to follow a curriculum, unit by unit, subject by subject like AP exams or NYS Regents. They want freedom to teach their students what they think it's important to know. You do too--you don't need a curriculum. You just need to find a job (like private school) that allows you to develop your own lesson plans with no exam at the end that you have to teach your students how to ace it.

I don't agree with the tenor of this, and it gets at something that's bothered me about the debate over learning and teaching in the US lately.

Teachers *should* have a curriculum. It's ridiculous to suggest that one can simply make up a course of study as one goes along. And students *do* need to be tested--the point of education is to convey ideas to students, and there needs to be a mechanism for determining if one is successfully doing that or not. How one goes about determining what constitutes a curriculum and how testing should accomplished are up for debate--there are certainly good and bad ways to do both.

Yes, teachers want (and, if they are capable and experienced, deserve) freedom to determine what materials they are going to use and what methods they are going to employ in order to accomplish their goals. Teaching isn't assembly-line work; what works for one student won't work for all students. But what I see far too much of, in the legitimate dismay of some teachers at the worst aspects of implementing curricula and testing, is a broader suggestion that simply doing away with both and "letting teachers teach and students learn" is the best answer. And, IMO, that is simply WRONG.

Likewise, there has always been resistance in (at least public schools with unionised teaching staffs) to the idea of merit pay, merit promotion, and achievement standards for job retention. I realise that performance grading can be used to play favourites; news flash: that's true in professions other than teaching, and people have figured out ways to prevent or at least minimise that. And I understand that progress in education isn't only down to teachers; for students to achieve, there needs to be productive effort from teacher *and* students *and* suitable conditions (parental support, a good learning environment, adequate resources, reasonable expectations for how much change can be achieved).

But in the end, public education is a system established to educate the citizenry. It needs to do that job. Its purpose is not to provide unthreatened, lifetime employment for a particular class of the population, or for teachers to simply teach whatever they feel like and decide, independent of school systems and communties, "what they think it's important to know". Far too often I see objections being raised to education evaluation that speak more to teachers' fear for their jobs than to the legitimate need to evaluate the progress of students and the ability of teachers.

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Yes, you're right.

I have (at home, behind my masters diploma in its frame) a Texas professional lifetime secondary teaching certificate in physics and physical science. It was one of three awarded in Texas in 1990. Most first time teaching certificates at the time were provisional, though a few of us with masters credentials and exceptional ratings got the coveted professional lifetime certificate right out of the box. I have no idea whether the other two actually got used or not. I took the extra graduate hours of ed classes in order to have a fall-back plan if astronomy didn't work out.

All the really good teachers I met (and yes, there are some out there) know that they have to build up a sound curricular structure. Then they can deviate from that structure as student interest and current events indicate, going more deeply into specific topics of interest. But if you don't have a good curriculum to begin with, you don't know where you're going and you don't know how to get there. You also don't have anything to pass to a substitute teacher if you're out sick.

[ingenious76.livejournal.com]

Yep, you do need a curriculum. Otherwise, you end up with an inbalanced education. If you have a Science teacher who only wants to teach biology, a historian who only wants to teach about the world wars, and an English specialist who only wants to teach Byron, you end up with a limited perspective.

[redactrice.livejournal.com]

For once in my life, I agree with everything you just said. :-)

[winterbadger]

*boggle*

I have to get this journal entry bronzed. :-)

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Curricula have very definite uses. They prevent the teaching of garbage like creationism. They also ensure that key areas get covered and children don't miss out on important areas (Like say, reproductive biology) because something thinks that ignorance is good.

A minimum standard is need in many subjects. Yes there can be scope for flexibility in teaching methods, and even for choice in non-key areas of study, but not in the big things.