Learning a new curriculum is always a challenge for any teacher, and it’s one that most of us deal with at least a few times in our careers. In my 9 years so far, I have changed schools four times, and taught English for every grade from 8th through 12th. I’ve also taught both U.S. and World history. That’s a lot of new curricula to learn in 9 years.
I always feel bad for my students my first year with a new curriculum. Usually, no matter what the reason is for a curriculum change, we don’t get our hands on new curriculum until just a few weeks before the school year begins. That’s not a lot of time to plan. Besides, some trial and error and reflection is always necessary to figure out how a curriculum can be used and modified and tailored to fit the needs of the actual students in your classroom. The first year is kind of like a “rough draft,” a “work in progress,” which means that the students in your classroom that year may not be getting your best teaching.
This year, I started at a new school that was just adopting a new 10th grade English curriculum. It was not only new to me, but new to everyone in the district. None of us could share tips and tricks with each other, and we were asked to implement the new curriculum with fidelity this year so that we would be able to figure out what to adjust for next year. The curriculum follows a pretty set structure:
- Students read and annotate a text.
- Students answer critical thinking questions about the text.
- Teacher uses videos and models skills in skill lessons.
- Students apply the skill lessons to the text in a close read, and then complete a writing prompt that shows how they applied the skills.
At all parts of this process, there are suggested prompts for discussion, both as a class and in small groups, and there are a million ways to differentiate it and change it up, and there are more creative and authentic extensions that can be used with each text. For the past eight months, I have experimented with all the curriculum has to offer.
I’ve implemented with fidelity, and my students have most definitely improved their close reading skills, and their analytical writing skills. There are many things about the new curriculum that I like, that will work for me and my students, and that align with what I know to be current best practices, but there are other things that I will set aside in future years, because they are not what is best for my students (I’m looking at you, Candide excerpt). It’s been a good “rough draft” year overall.
With just a few weeks left in the school year, though, my students and I needed a change. We needed some creativity and some authenticity. We needed some passion to finish out the year. The unit we were doing in the curriculum was all about taking a stand, so I decided to have students take a stand on an issue that they care about. I gave them many different project options, and let them choose any issue, big or small. They could even work in groups. It was so open-ended that I was a little nervous about what the results would be, but they seriously blew me away with their creativity and passion.
Three boys who have really been struggling with the writing prompts in the curriculum decided to write a letter to the school board asking them to make our district’s high school start time later. Two of them have not turned in any of the close read writing prompts from this cardmarking, and the third did not really meet the requirements on any of them. My first thought was that they might have made a bad choice when they formed a group, but immediately, they started researching school start times and how they affect students. I pointed out that Seattle had recently made a change to later start times, so they found a few articles detailing the success they’ve had there. They wrote a 1.5 page letter all about it, giving their opinion and citing specific examples to support it.
One student created an elaborate pro-choice and pro-Planned Parenthood poster. She hand-painted a pie chart showing what services Planned Parenthood provides, and she cited statistics about how free or low cost family planning services help women and society. Another student, who hardly ever spoke up in class all semester, did a ten minute speech in front of the class passionately arguing her pro-life position. She said more words that day than I had heard from her all year.
My favorite creation was a creative poster about pollution. The students drew a tree in the foreground with a factory on one side of the background and a green landscape on the other side. They glued leaves, some with facts about pollution written on them, to just the side of the tree closer to the green landscape, leaving the side by the factory barren.
I am so glad that I chose to give my students so much freedom to express themselves and put their own voices out there. It was a truly wonderful way to wrap up a semester of learning, and this project is definitely going in my “keep” pile for next year.
Here are some of the resources I used with this project:
- Directions and rubric
- Slideshow with examples-none were student created because I hadn’t used this project before
- Student reflection form- I used a form instead of having students do a full process analysis because they were still pretty new to reflecting in this way.