Reconstitution!

Welcome, members of the Newnan Crossing Elementary Understanding by Design Liaison Group!

Since we needed a place for our asynchronous collaboration, I figured why not dust off my old blog here and use it as a base camp?

Why a blog? It will allow us to meet and comment and plan and collaborate without having to find a time when some/most/never all of us can be there. For example, here are your first two assignments:

1. Create a Blogger account for yourself if you don't already have one. It's free, and you'll never be bugged by them or any associates. You'll need to be a "member" in order to leave comments and write posts. (Click on that orange Blogger logo in the upper right hand corner to get started. But first bookmark this website!)
   
2. After you're a member, come back here and leave a comment for this post. Underneath this post, see where it says Post a comment? Click on that. Leave a comment, just any old thing.

That's it for our first meeting. Easy, wasn't it?

New Post

There's a new post over on the new blog, Dale Says. It's about governors, business leaders, and the toughening of standards.

We're moving!

The Curriculum Liberation Front is moving over to my actual website, and actually becoming part of a personal blog called Dale Says. Catchy title, no?

Change your bookmarks to http://dalelyles.com/blog/.

I've moved all the old posts from here to there, even datestamped them the same, but alas, the comments they have not moved. Feel free to repost your comments, or to add new ones.

Excelsior!

Dale

A moratorium

I hereby propose a moratorium on the word important in any GPS enduring understanding or essential question.

Today I attended a very good session for third grade teachers on "unpacking" a standard. When it got down to writing essential questions, it was amazing at the number of EQs that contained the word important. What got me to thinking about the issue was an EQ that my team wrote on the writing standard. We proposed, "Why is writing so hard?", the idea being that we would tap into the students' dislike/fear of writing and springboard into the various solutions as suggested by the elements of that standard.

The crowd reaction at first was one of excitement, but then it was suggested that the EQ was too "negative," and the next thing we knew, the EQ had been amended to "Why is writing important?"

Well.

If the purpose of an essential question is to provoke discussion and exploration—and it is—then why in the name of all that's engaging would we shy away from a provocative question like "Why is writing so hard?" and replace it with some teacher-talk like "Why is writing important?" There isn't a kid on this planet who doesn't see right through the "important" BS: it's just a trap to enforce the student's compliance with the teacher's view of things. It is humbug of the most offensive sort.

I completely understand that not every teacher would want to lead off with such an in-your-face EQ, but honey, please. Most of the EQs were simply lesson plans in disguise. Do you really want to dig into whether "following the rules of grammar helps you understand written and oral communication?" ::yawn::

So we could have rewritten the question, "Are there ways to make writing easier for me?", or "What can I do to make my writing better?", or any other question that actually sounds like it might be asked by a student, preferably a question that produces some interest in seeing it answered.

Therefore, teachers, a new commandment: Thou shalt not write essential questions that merely embed thine unfiltered instructional agenda without any attempt to understand how a student in thy care might actually think.

Because that's important.

GPS training

Yesterday, I got to go to a session presented by dedicated fellow professionals here in Coweta County, the purpose of which was to nudge our teachers one more step into getting ready for the GPS.

First, let me say that the information was spot on, very important stuff, and that our presenters were sharp and prepared.

Second, let me say why I think it was not enough.

The purpose of the session was simply to introduce the vocabulary of the new curriculum: performance standard, essential question, enduring understandings, task, elements, etc., etc., etc. This all fell squarely into our View #1 of learning, taxon memory, in which the brain is confronted with what appears to be random, non-contextualized information, and it very appropriately resists learning it.

So here we had a very large room of dedicated teachers, most of whom I wager have been dreaming of a curriculum like the one we're getting, and yet most of whom I'd wager again left that room still without the basic vocabulary of that new curriculum. Again, not the fault of our presenters.

What would I do differently, if my wand still worked?

• Smaller groups. Plenty of discussion and sharing. It's too easy for 100 people to abdicate responsibility for the information when there are 150 people in the room.
  
• Examples of implementation at every step. Sure, there's ELA2R1, but what will it look like when I have to do it with students?
  
• Recognition of concerns, rooting out of misconceptions, confirming understanding—you know, the very things we're supposed to do with students
  

Sure, easy enough for me to say, but my wand doesn't work and there's not enough funding or staffing to do it this way. Ah well.

And I will say this: Backwards design begins at home. Yo, State Department of Education—before we can design instruction that will fulfill these standards, before we can do our performance task, we have to know what the assessment is going to be! I can have all kinds of evidence of understanding on the part of our third graders about the travails of Frederick Douglass and the dynamics of slavery, but what is the CRCT going to ask about?

Our page 1 problem

Here’s the problem that crops up immediately in our study of Frederick Douglass: “Frederick Douglass was born a slave.” And what, to a 21st century third grader, does that mean? If our average 8-year-old doesn’t understand what slavery is, the whole point of choosing Douglass as part of our third-grade curriculum is lost.

Here's a quick experiment:

The Three Kindreds of the Eldar were the Vanyar, the Noldor and the Teleri. All of the Vanyar and Noldor went to Aman. Many of the Teleri also journeyed to Valinor, but twice a host of this people turned away from the Journey in Middle-earth; these two kindreds are called Úmanyar, the Eldar not of Aman. The first of these were the Nandor, who turned aside east of the Misty Mountains, and travelled down the River Anduin. The second, the Sindar, tarried in Beleriand seeking their lord, Elwë Singollo.

Got it? Unless you are a Silmarillion scholar (we prefer that term over "Tolkien freak"), you'd find it very difficult to begin any kind of activity based on the knowledge implicit in this one paragraph. For example: Draw a chart showing how the Vanyar, Noldor, Teleri, and Sindar are related. Name the most prominent Eldar of each people. Easy enough, unless you have no clue about the Noldor and the mess they got themselves and Middle-Earth into at the end of the First Age. (Bet you had no idea that Galadriel was an unrepentant rebel, and that’s why she’s still hanging around Lothlorien when Frodo shows up.)

So, let's look at our Douglass book and how we need to think about getting the kids into it. Page one starts with his birth, his birthname, and the fact that he and his mother were slaves. He was "born a slave."

Page two tells us that Douglass lived with his grandmother twelve miles away from the plantation. He saw his mother four or five times before she died when he was seven.

Page three: when he was six, his grandmother took him to the “big house” and left him, where he began his life of servitude.

Page four: we learn that slaves were beaten. When Douglass’s “own aunt Hester was tied to a hook and whipped,” he ran into a closet and hid.

There’s our first day of reading. What key context do we need to provide to students so that they can even suggest the obstacles Douglass had to overcome in his life?

Page 1

Having selected David A. Adler's Picture book of Frederick Douglass as our base text, I photocopied the pages and put them into a notebook. I've gone through every page, selecting vocabulary words; creating comprension questions; proposing activities for advanced/gifteed students.

On page one, we're given his birthplace, his birthname (Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey), and the facts that he and his mother were slaves, while his father was an unknown white man, perhaps his owner, Captain Aaron Anthony.

Comprehension questions:

• Why did he change his name?
  
• What does "his first owner" mean?
  
• Why doesn't the book tell us his birthday?
  

Our lesson plan calls for the class to keep a chart of characters in our narrative, most of whom are mentioned only once. This page has Harriet Bailey, his mother; and Capt. Anthony, his first owner.

Activities:

• Start the timeline with Douglass's birth in 1818.
  
• Show Maryland on the regional map. (Students have a regional map, a U.S. map, and a world map.)
  
• Use an atlas to find where Talbot County is in Maryland, and show it on the map.
  
• Use a chart showing the dates of the states' admission to the Union and color in the states that were states in 1818.
  

We immediately have a problem, which I'll talk about tomorrow.