How did you build your curriculum? We began to discuss this earlier today. As a teacher with no developed curriculum, I am a little worried about getting thrown into the fire and being expected to have a detailed lesson plan every day. I understand that trial and error is involved, but how did you overcome this? What was your experience like when you first began teaching? In Japan, my curriculum was standardized so students could transfer schools without worrying about how their new teacher was going to teach. This made it a good starting point, but I definitely broke that rule more and more as I became more experienced. You told me that a lot of the readings came from something you read on your own time. I never really thought about that, so I will start asking myself, “Is this something I could use for class?” By December, I want to figure out an effective way to plan for lessons.
This is the big one. I had a conversation with my wife about this to sort out my own thoughts. To be honest, this was MY biggest bugaboo as a teacher. Like you, I came to teaching with a wealth of classroom teaching experience for a company, but virtually NO experience creating curriculum. In fact, I’m not sure I believe they should be the same job – both are INCREDIBLY complex, nuanced, and time-consuming skills to learn and refine, and mastering both is nearly impossible. I think either could easily be the subject of four years of study in school to prepare for the job, for 8 years total.
My own curriculum really didn’t cement until this past year. After 5 years of teaching a set curriculum, I had four of teaching on my own – and a different course subject for three of those four years. My first year I was teaching 12th grade World Lit, the second freshman Survey of Lit, and the third and fourth 10th grade American Lit. Each year I felt completely adrift – would anything I taught the previous year be appropriate? Effective? Appealing? Challenging, but not overwhelming? How to define the texts to use? The skills to teach?
What I’ve come to as a strategy, I’d say, boils down to a few essentials:
Start with a question. If you’re reading a book, the question YOU should be able to answer is: “what about this book changes the way I see the world? How does it do it?” Kids are hungry for knowledge, but have been conditioned to act blasé. You need to break through that by having a solid idea of why what you present isn’t just interesting, it’s FASCINATING. I start every unit with a question that is inherently interesting that will trigger incorrect assumptions kids have about the world. By exposing these assumptions, you get them curious about what’s been “hidden” from them, and can keep them invested.
Everything you teach should be able, explicitly, to be connected with future success and, perhaps more importantly, life outside the classroom. Every text I choose usually ties back to some major life skill. In Am Lit, I taught Huckleberry Finn as rhetoric – both how Mark Twain used fiction to assault American assumptions about race, but also how Jim uses rhetoric to persuade Huck through his “magic ball.” The message? If you understand rhetorical appeals and develop argument as a skill, you can change the world – both in interpersonal interactions in daily life and culturally and socially on a much larger scale.
The endless and detailed “skills” that state standards and, to a much lesser extent, the Common Core State Standards make you adhere to in your planning may seem daunting, but I’ve found that, in the end, they can be boiled down to a simple process: discuss, read, discuss, write. In every unit, I use the same basic formula: discuss (pose a question that provokes, activating prior knowledge), read (close reading and analysis of one or more texts on the subject, focusing on whatever reading skills – tone, thesis, assertions, use of evidence, rhetorical appeals, authorial bias, etc. – the unit uses), discuss (what you’ve read!), and WRITE. The final step asks them to form their own, more three-dimensional and nuanced, view of the topic, then defend it and explicate using specific evidence from the text. When necessary for introducing new ideas, I’ll use a class or two for lecture.
Choose material that fascinates YOU. The kids will be just as interested in what you teach as you are – one of the best tools in any teacher’s arsenal is finding the work they give kids deep and delightful. Kids will see it and react to it; even if they don’t see the interesting elements immediately, they will be challenged and intrigued if they know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you are giving them work that YOU find important and interesting. Model that interest constantly, from talking about your own misconceptions when you began studying it, to how your understanding of the text has changed and evolved with each reading, to your continued research into the topic, to the new elements students in previous classes have discovered, to hinting at the “secrets” about the topic that are coming as they explore. You need to model what it is to be an earnest, motivated, engaged learner for kids, and that’s not something you can fake. Kids smell a fake from miles away – most adults are more than a little fake or dismissive with them, and they hate it.
The argument can be made that curriculum should be decided by what’s best for kids, not teachers, but let me be clear: I don’t mean you should give kids texts inappropriate for them. Think about your materials from the kids’ perspective. In addition, constantly re-evaluate by directly polling kids: “was that easy? Too hard? Confusing? Would it help if I … ?” and so on. Whatever you find fascinating, you need to find or modify texts to make them appropriate for kids in your classes. This can take amazing amounts of time; in my first three years, I often clobbered my poor students with work that was far too difficult. Over time, I learned to sort through articles I assigned in-class, re-writing to remove overly complex or confusing grammatical instructions but leave enough to challenge. I now process every reading thoroughly, including an “annotation sidebar,” numbered paragraphs, a “vocabulary corner” with functional definitions of key vocabulary, and a list of specific textual analysis and close reading questions numbered by paragraph.
Ultimately, make peace with the fact that you, just like your students, will need to fail a lot to do well as a teacher. It’s the process of learning, and teaching, above all else, is a skill learned by error-focused practice. You’ll find your own strategies, accumulate texts you love, and work out strategies that you’ll tweak and play with every year. Every teacher begins with certain advantages, and those of us who stay with the profession survive through a combination of stealing shamelessly, stumbling onto brilliant mistakes we hone into personal strengths, being honest and enthusiastic about what needs work, and above all, enjoying the process.
When we can.
It’s a pleasure having you in the room, Mr. Kandah, and I hope these ramblings prove useful in some way. I’m grateful that you’re there to ask me – articulating why I do what I do helps me see my strengths and weaknesses more clearly and allows me to grow as a teacher.
Thank you.
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