[I-1][I-2]Classroom Design for Scripted Curriculum

On Left-Second grade teacher Garnet Mell teaches her classes based on scripted lessons plans from Success for All.

First of all the dilemma of many new teachers in the K - 8 environment and exemplified in the article “Lost at Sea” by Kauffamn, Johnson, Kardos, Liu and Peske really hit home to me. While I have never taught elementary school, I was an adjunct professor in an university school of Architecture. There was no curriculum guide (other than a sentence about my course from the every-six-years accreditation board) and no supervision. Moreover, the department head considered me successful if they never heard anything about me – No gripes from me, my students or their parents. Well, the flipside to no curriculum is a main focus concern–the scripted curriculum.

This issues brings me back to Landson-Billing’s article “But That’s Just Good Teaching”, where they categorize the successful teacher as one who was “not dependant on state curriculum frameworks or textbooks to decide what and how to teach”. Yet I learned that variance from the framework of the reform can make the true effectiveness of the reform curriculum not assessable. In my readings this week I noted that Cohen writes about the “gap between the curriculum developer’s intentions for students and what actually happens in lessons”. So, I suppose that effective reform must begin with a well devised curriculum that is completely implemented and correctly assessed. Therefore, I wonder if the Model Classroom of the Future can’t function in two formats –

1.) A Teaching Classroom (funded by the national textbook companies). In this learning environment the printed curriculum would be replaced by the mass-customized learning media arriving directly to each child and uniquely crafted to sort each student’s presentations based on his last response. Teacher support and all student actions would be quantified and recorded for use in revising the curricula.

2.) A Learning Classroom in which the learning media arrives directly to each child, modified by a student’s actual responses. The efficacy of the lesson for each child can be directly derived from individual assessment. The learning media should certainly incorporate the 5 domains discussed in “Reform: By the Book…” by Ball and Cohen and the learning media would not be a single purchase, but an on-line, real-time system that is constantly revised. Perhaps it is modified in a fashion to emulate the current Japanese model of incremental review. --Mikael Powell
++++++++++++++COMMENT---Hi Mikael: I'm still intrigued by your content-delivery idea - I've never even considered it, and it seems brilliant from a first-take... standardize delivery of instructional content we can all agree on, at some national level using technical skill (the technician side) at relatively low cost, then specialize/differentiate other value-laden content using professional teachers hired at a local level... a sort of 'split day' that could generate some basic levels of competenceat a national scale, while allowing for local control and delivery of everything else... go after this!! And then tell me when you figure it out!! :)C