Curriculum Development Process
What is your school’s curriculum development process? Talk to your district Curriculum Development Coordinator or a fellow teacher who has served on curriculum committees.
January 20, 2007
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The curriculum development varies in our district depending on who feels that there needs to be a revamping of a certain area of the curriculum. For example, the Curriculum Committee looks at the social studies text every four years. A representive from each grade level is present. A variety of books are looked at and narrowed down to a couple–depending which book is a better fit to meets the standards of the district and state. Two teachers then pilot the new books and make recommendations. This, of course, is different from how the new Reading Curriculum was developed. I’ll save that story for another time!
As far as curriculum goes, our school gets materials from the distributors and then has the team of teachers (usually content) area sit and review them. I personally have never been a part of this process, but in talking to some colleagues who have, they tell me it is incredibly monotonous and painstaking. After the materials have been selected, the decision on content is more of a district wide thing. As I mentioned in class, the Barrington school district is K-12 so they try to map the curriculum vertically as well as horizontally. Therefore, when we allign the curriculum, the high school, the other middle school, the state standards, and our own teachers all have a say!
When my district decided to teach algebra to middle school students, the math project team was created. It consisted of middle school and high school math teachers, principals, the curriculum director and the superintendent. This initiative was completely top down and, while the majority of teachers did not believe it was in the best interests of the students, it was decided to have a two year program starting in 7th grade. Because the high school already had a textbook for algebra, the decision was to use the same text. As Tim stated, our district aligns vertically when possible.
The high school teachers have requested to look for a new text, so I will probably be involved with that text adoption in order to have some say in what happens in the middle school.
Our district is undergoing a curriculum roadmap right now geared towards individual grade levels. Teams were designed based on each grade level and then they are holding these grade level meetings 4 times this year to go over the curriculum roadmap. Currently we are going over the kindergarten state standards and applying them to our current curriculum. We pinpointing which standard we are teaching and when we are teaching that standard. Right now the entire process is a bit clustered and there are just too many chiefs and TOO many indians running amoke! The group running the sessions are very knowledgeable in kindergarten and I believe have taught kindergarten, but they are going over some really basic skills that is a bit degrating to me. I understand the need to make sure we all know what shared and guided reading is…HOWEVER I don’t need to pretend to be a kindergartner while they teach the rest of the group that doesn’t know it…. A HUGE waste of my time.
Plus they want us to be on the same page with EVERYTHING! Back to my cookie cutter comment. NOT going to do it!
I discovered today that our district hires a company to design our curriculum. There are binders with the steps floating around the school somewhere, but trying to find one is like being on a snipe hunt. I am very curious to see what the steps are, so I’ll continue the hunt tomorrow..
I didn’t find any snipes today, but I did talk to someone who had actually used the mystery binder. She said the process is very well laid out (and researched) and that it worked well. She felt it was a good system overall; ideal for a smaller district, but not exactly the best for a district our size. She brought up some of the same issues we discussed in class about trying to fit 3 very different schools into one mold. I hope it doesn’t lead to moldy students
District 158 adopted curriculum mapping about four years ago. The seconday level maps were completed last year and are going to be accessible to parents online. All of the maps are first approved by the department heads, school principal, and then given the rubber stamp by the district’s curriculum director. The teachers in district 158 are given a great deal of lattitude when it comes to designing the curriculum for their subject areas. The teachers are viewed as the “experts” and the one that can best address the needs of the students. It is not going to be difficult to implement a thematic curriculum by next year. The only thing that needs to take place is that the current map will have to be completely overhauled so that it coincides with a thematic approach. The only sticking point is going to be if the district is going to be stingy and not pay me for it.
With our school district it appears to be at least a 2 year process. (painful, it seems) Our assist.super. thinks the team of volunteers should attempt to write their own curriculum and then hunt for the textbook that is closest to what they’ve written! To me that is way overwhelming when the textbook writers are supposedly ‘experts’ in design. I hope I am never on a curriculum committee in our district under this assist.super (that God she is retiring soon). Once the comm. has their plan in order, they will look at other districts, and then eventually will have reps come or just look at a variety of textbooks.
Dana, if you have that book you mentioned about differentiation I love to see it. See you all tonight!
Our district is in a state of transition. Our higher administration including our superintendent has been changed recently. With all these changes new administrators come in with their own ideas and agendas. We are continuing to work on our curriculum map but now we are just reorganizing the format a bit. We are still teaching the same information but just rearranging the binders. From talking with a few teachers it seems that the overall curriculum seems to be based on our honors Modern Biology book. Many years ago the teachers met and compared the content they each taught with one another; it was basically the same so they continued to teach in the same manner that they always had. As far as anyone seems to know, that is where our curriculum came from. It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that each course had started to be officially mapped across all four schools in our district. The map seems to be based on what has always been taught but now they are outlining not only the content but also the essential questions, skills to be gained, and assessment to be used. I don’t think we make a conscious effort to continually check that our goals are aligned with state standards. However, I looked up the science state standards and our curriculum hits on the standards. So even though our curriculum wasn’t officially aligned with state standards we hit them anyway.
The process for adding a new course to the curriculum at BHS is fairly unstructured and informal compared to other area high schools. The teacher wishing to add the course draws up the proposal together with the Dept. Chair which should include the rationale, course description, objectives, costs and information about which population the course is intending to reach. The proposal is then brought before the supervisory committee made up of admins and chairs, who review the proposal and rather casually decide whether the course should be added or not (according to the assistant principal I interviewed). Once approved, the curriculum can be developed by the teacher and the course is added to the course guide. We also use online curriculum mapping to maintain and revise our “blueprints”.