I didn't have a clue...when I participated in my first curriculum development experience. Still a graduate student in an M.A.T. program, I was preparing to do my internship (student teaching) in a school with no full-time English teachers. My fellow interns and I were the English Department and we inherited absolutely nothing in the way of curriculum—except the kids themselves and some used books. Zero, zip, zilch in the curriculum department. And this was 25 years before anyone even started talking about the standards movement! I'm not sure how effective we were with those kids that year, but we certainly learned a lot about what did and did not work in curriculum development. In a word...know your clientele!
Experience number two occurred in my first two years of teaching in a large, suburban high school (2200 students in grades 10-12) where I had a wonderful experience designing all kinds of interesting curricula for a "phased elective program" that was all the rage then. English and social studies departments in particular were building six-week elective courses on all kinds of high interest topics. Remember, this was 1971-1973 and high schools were in the "if we build it they will come" mode. In this progressive era, I taught film, film-making, consumer reading, science fiction, and a host of other topics that WE thought would be engaging for our students. This was an interesting time for curriculum development and was followed shortly by the usual cycle...back-to-basics.
During the next 10 years, I had almost total free-rein in developing curriculum for my middle school and high school classes; also, many opportunities to work on a new school program for both levels. Heady times...exciting...and very challenging.
What did I learn from all of this? Lessons learned will be described in a subsequent post.
2 comments:
I can imagine developing your own curriculum being very fun and exciting. However, I am sure starting from scratch was very time consuming and challenging as well.
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