Scott+McAnally+-+Colleague+Correspondence+(October+8th)

On October 8th, 2011 I sat down to discuss unit planning with two former teachers. Mr. and Mrs. K are retired teachers from Plymouth-Canton Community Schools. Mr. K worked at the high school level and Mrs. K worked at the elementary and middle school levels. Both spent a large portion of their careers working with special education students. The following is a rough transcript of our conversation.

Q: What was your role in the unit planning process?

Mrs. K: There is a district-wide mandated curriculum that is handed to all teachers and it is developed by a few select individual teachers. The curriculum is based on the GLCE and HSCE. One teacher from each department in each school is designated as the subject area representative and is tasked with designing the scope and sequence for the district grade levels with the other representatives. This group of representatives decides which state standards they feel are the most important and design curriculum based off of those select standards.

Mr. K: The experience at the high school level is pretty much the same. It should be said, however, that there is still plenty of room at the individual teacher level to design your own lesson plans and activities. The district mandates certain content items, such as "20th century civil rights," but they do not tell you that you must talk about Martin Luther King and not Malcolm X or Helen Keller. The department at the school may get together to discuss what specific examples they will use to cover a certain area of the curriculum, but the mandates from the district are broad and allow for individual creativity from the teacher.

Q: How has curriculum planning changed over your career?

Mrs. K: The biggest change occurred in the early 2000s with NCLB. There were other factors, but the implementation of NCLB made traditional school-level decisions (like unit planning) into federal decisions to a certain degree. Over the past ten years there has been a gradual shift from local level to state level involvement in school decisions. If you ask me I think it is a great thing. It used to be that a new teacher was told that they need to teach 'early civilization' to 7th graders for 36 weeks. Go. Now there is more direction and more accountability to make sure teachers are efficiently using their time. At the elementary level, there is no more room for "fluff" like there used to be. Every activity has to have some academic purpose and needs to be aligned to a standard on the GLCE.

Q: Do you ever find the curriculum that your district develops for you restricting?

Mr. K: Generally the curriculum is broad enough that you can do what you'd like with it. We were talking earlier about the content standards for economics and how personal finance is not given an equal share to other more macro concepts. A teacher can decide how much time is devoted to certain elements of the curriculum. So if you feel like personal finance is more important than supply and demand then you can spend more time on it. You just have to make sure you 'hit' everything on the curriculum at some point, but the weight you put on each item is up to you. My experience is that high school teachers get a little bit more freedom on lesson topics than at the elementary level. Social studies teachers definitely have the most freedom compared to science and math.

Q: Do you have any suggestions for a future teacher on how to approach unit planning?

Mrs. K: If you really care about the curriculum and you believe there is a better way, get involved. A good way to stay sane as a new teacher is to only complain about the things you can change, and then change them. If it is out of your control find a way to deal with it that doesn't consume your energy. Also, if your lesson is not working don't be afraid to stop in the middle of it and transition to something else. It's better to admit you made a mistake than to make the children feel like they are at fault for a poorly designed lesson plan.

Mr. K: When designing a unit plan or lesson plan, always include multiple methods of getting the information across to the students. Not all students learn the same way and you will be doing them a disservice if you only use one approach. The same goes for assessment, be sure to include a number of different ways students can demonstrate their knowledge of the content.