Curriculum

**Curriculum and Unit Planning**
by Ivelisse Ramos
 * Baptism by fire:** **A candid reflection on my first experience with curriculum planning**

The South Bronx High School in which I I teach, not unlike many within the NYC Public School System, has not established a four-year curriculum for students. By mid-September, the administration requires all teachers to submit a curriculum map that is aligned to the vague set of New York State standards for reading, writing, and speaking. Last year I happily, albeit loosely, followed the map left by my predecessor. This school year, I was intent on drafting a new map with texts, activities, and assessments of my own choosing. I met with Ms. Rose-- the teacher who would split the freshman class with me--in August to begin planning. This was particularly difficult for Ms. Rose and me because, unlike those teaching 10th-12th graders, we could not solicit anecdotal information about our students from colleagues. We had no idea what we would be dealing with come September. With eight years of teaching experience under her belt, Ms. Rose was relatively calm about our situation. I was not.

Nervous and frustrated, I sat down with Ms. Rose, and we began by reviewing the eith-grade ELA test scores of our incoming ninth graders. We scrutinized the ethnicity demographic of the new class; we even took a map of the Bronx and Manhattan and plotted our new students' addresses. Finally, we made a list of the skills and concepts we felt were most vital for them to learn based on their test scores and the ninth-grade standards. Pencils in hand, we began to fill in copies of blank curriculum maps.

Our new class was split: roughly half of our new students are Black (African-American, Caribbean, West-Indian, and North African); half are Hispanic (Puerto-Rican, Dominican, and Central-American). Because many our students received ones and twos on their middle-school ELA tests, we decided to start the year reviewing basic reading strategies. We would move on to a new unit every four-to-six weeks; we would spend nearly 85% of the year working out of the new textbooks our school purchased. The textbook was fantastic, we agreed. (It's more like an anthology filled with canonical and culturally-relevant texts; and it includes units on informational and visual media.) We decided on designing a uniform baseline, mid-line, and end-line assessment. I thought we were golden.

Halfway through the first semester, I began to understand that my kids needed and wanted something different. They quickly tired of the textbook; and reading novels during independent-reading time was more frustrating than productive. They wanted to read a novel--not an excerpt from a novel in the textbook. They wanted to read a whole novel--together--as a class. I soon realized that my curriculum map would need to be overhauled. It needed to be tailored to the specific needs and interests of my kids.


 * Elements of Curriculum Design:**


 * I. Knowing your students:**

Ms. Rose and I were on the track in getting to know our new students’ test histories before meeting them. Reviewing this data gave us a general idea of their readiness level; and we were able to plan our first few weeks of instruction. However, knowing test scores and racial/ethnic classifications are one several of steps in learning who your kids are. New York City school teachers work in classrooms with students that are incredibly diverse--culturally and linguistically. Our kids come to school with myriad experiences and different “ways of knowing” (Smagorinsky, 2008). Students, parents, and members of the surrounding community can offer a wealth of information known as “funds of knowledge” (Moll et al, 2001)--a body of knowledge based on accumulated social, personal, and cultural experiences. Invite students and their relatives to share these unique experiences, and use them as a resource in your classroom.

Getting to know your students and becoming familiar with their social worlds (Beach & Myers, 2001) will help you to design instruction and activities, select texts, and create assessments that will make your teaching relevant and accessible to them. It will also add richness to your instruction and extend learning outside of the classroom. You can get to know your students by spending time in their communities, talking to and meeting with parents, inviting parents and members of the community into your classroom, and asking your students about their interests. At the beginning of the year, I put my students in pairs and have them interview one another. They then create mini bios of one another that are published and placed on a bulletin board with their pictures. This activity serves as both a diagnostic (for mechanics) and an ice breaker.

As you begin to plan your curriculum and/or units, consider the whole picture. Learn about the community you teach in, the demographic of the community and school, and the school's history. Then get more specific by focusing on your group of students.

The following is a sample context statement:

By Ivelisse Ramos, 9th-grade English teacher
 * MY SCHOOL:**

The Bronx Performance Conservatory High School occupies the fourth floor of a towering art-deco school building on the corner of 173rd Street and Boston Road in the Morrisania section of the South Bronx. Performance Conservatory (PC) is one of three schools that share what was formerly known as the Herman Ridder School. Although the outside and much of the first floor are surprisingly well maintained, our floor, like most of the neighborhood, has fallen into disrepair.

Morrisania is one of the poorest neighborhoods in America; and so it is no surprise that most of the area schools, ours included, are classified as Title I. Most of PC’s 425 students receive free lunch; the majority of students live with only one parent or are under the guardianship of a grandparent; about 20% live or have lived in foster care or group homes. Nearly thirty percent of the school’s population has an Individualized Education Program (IEP); less than five percent are English Language Learners (ELLs).

As one of two ninth-grade ELA teachers in the school, it was my responsibility to evaluate middle school test grades and conduct thorough diagnostic exams this past September. This year, I am teaching two sections of English and one section of Advisory. At the beginning of the year, there were nearly sixty students in my combined ELA classes; today there are under fifty; several were taken out of my class and placed in 12-1, self-contained classes; others were placed in the ESL push-in class with the other ninth-grade ELA teacher.


 * MY STUDENTS:**

All freshmen are required to take double-period blocks of ELA and Math this year. I am with my students for at least one and a half hours each day; three days a week; half of them have me for another 45 minutes of Advisory. The extended ELA periods are ideal for completing both reading and writing assignments. I have only two male students (one was placed in my classroom in mid-December). About half of my kids are Hispanic/Latino, and the other half are African-American, South Indian, or North African. My gender and ethnicity have played an important role in building rapport with my students.

Of “my girls,” only six have an IEP. Of those, three have math computation deficiencies. The other three have speech/language delays. I have three F-ELL (former ELL) students, all of which are performing at the highest levels in reading comprehension among their peers. The writing abilities of my F-ELLs are on par with their peers. Although the vast majority of my kids are mainstream, general-education students, they are performing far below what it expected of ninth-grade students nationwide. Most read at third and fourth-grade reading levels (1s and 2s in terms of middle-school grades); a handful read at fifth and sixth-grade reading levels; two are approaching grade level.

Overall, my students struggle with vocabulary, and there is a clear connection between their limited vocabularies and their reading deficiencies. Scaffolding everyday words like “element” and “contribute” is vital in my classroom. It is crucial for me to expose my students to as many unfamiliar words as possible. My year-long plan learning plan is replete with new and essential vocabulary to support my students’ reading, writing, and speaking needs. The words are found in the texts we read, aim questions, and homework assignments. To boost my students’ confidence, I often infuse aim questions with vocabulary words that are present in the day’s reading. When the students later find the word in the text, they are pleased about knowing its meaning.


 * II. Balance of literature:**

While planning your curriculum, it’s important to include a healthy balance of functional and literary texts. As English teachers, we can easily get preoccupied with teaching novels and poetry. After all, it’s our love of great literature that attracted many of us to this profession. Teachers of English, however, must guide students towards a universal, practical literacy. Students must be able to read and understand texts from all disciplines (e.g. math and science textbooks), as well as legal documents (e.g. contracts and legislative texts), and functional/expository texts such as newspapers, brochures, and scholarly articles (Burke, 2008).

Believe it or not, some kids have never picked up the newspaper; many have never seen or tried to decipher legal documents; and very few students know how to discern a credible source of information from an unreliable one. Be sure to incorporate at least one newspaper unit. Although some argue that the paper's future is precarious, they're still be printed--and luddites like me (and perhaps you) prefer tangible (literally) news.

Despite my general aversion to technology (I'm so sorry, Dr. Turner), I recognize technology as an essential component of my classroom instruction. These days, digital literacy is just as important (some would argue it's more important) than any other. Should we not use technology as a resource or fail to teach our students how to navigate though the Internet's seemingly endless harvests of new information, we would be remiss in our responsibility as educators. Consider doing a unit that evaluates news in various media. Teach kids how to find the "fine print" in advertisements. Show them how to read a cell-phone contract.


 * III. Backwards design:**

Understanding by Design, also known as “Backwards Design” (Wiggins & McTighe, 1998), is a method of curriculum design that focuses on the students learning through investigation and inquiry, inspired by essential questions, rather than rote memorization of content. In an Understanding by Design planned curriculum, the unit’s are built with the desired outcomes as the starting point, hence the appellation of backwards design.

An Understanding by Design (UBD) unit seeks to select core concepts and knowledge that will retain value outside of the classroom and the discipline. The emphasis is not on accumulation of data by the student but in building understanding and skills that the learner can carry away from the classroom and the discipline. When building lesson plans, educational standards (state and national) are taken into account, as well as teacher expertise and the belief that an not all content is equal: the aim of the UBD planned lesson is get to the “Big Ideas”; in order to achieve that goal, teachers need to assess the value of the content, and discriminate between what is essential to know, what is important to know, and what is worth being familiar with.

In keeping with this, assessment in an Understanding by Design classroom demands that students demonstrate not just content knowledge through the traditional methods of test and quiz, but “enduring understandings” through open-ended projects that demands complex and challenging responses to the essential questions.


 * IV. Rationale:**

There must always be a clear and legitimate rationale for the themes, units, texts, activities, and assessments that are built into your curriculum. Ask yourself questions like, ”Why have I chosen this text?” “Does this text meet the social and academic needs of my students?” “What kind of assessment do I want to administer, and why?” “What understanding(s) and/or knowledge do I want my students to glean from this activity?”


 * A.Sample rationales:**

By Michael Robert, 12th-grade AP English Teacher:
 * Rationale for Yearlong Theme:**

I chose the theme “All Things Must Change to Something New, to Something Strange” because senior year is an important time for high school students because it signifies a transition from: This is a time when many students are excited, anxious, and afraid of this change and it is a relevant theme worth exploring senior year. During the last few months of my first year teaching I witnessed some starling behavior from students who were about to graduate from high school. Some students were excited, of course, but some students began exhibiting foolish behavior. Students who hadn’t been in trouble at all during the first three years of school were in the dean’s office almost every day during the last three months of twelfth-grade. Some students began missing classes several days at a time. I deduced that many students in our school become extremely frightened by the idea that, after June, they would no longer be in high school. In a way, they were losing a safety net- a source of stability that had always be there even when many of their lives were extremely turbulent. I decided to focus on the motif of change in order to discuss and learn from the transition that seniors are about to make. Several of the motifs I decided to work with are: relationships, utopian societies, innocence, and the notion that, perhaps, not everything changes after all. In addition, this is a quote from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, an author we will be studying in an AP class, and reflects the level of rigor I expect from my students.
 * teenager to adult
 * high school to college
 * old friends to new friends
 * living with parents to living away from home

By Jeremy Chao, 7th-grade English teacher:
 * Rationale for Unit Theme:**

The Unit I am focusing on in detail is “Why do families change? Do any families last forever? How do we create new families?” This is especially important for at-risk students, who sometimes can feel ashamed by the disorder or dysfunction of their home lives. The texts used in this unit, “Fiesta 1980” by Junot Diaz and selected scenes from Slumdog Millionaire can show how children in vastly different or deficient home situations deal with the problems in their lives. All of my students either have personal experience or know of close friends with less than ideal family situations. It is silly to ignore that fact in the classroom. “Fiesta 1980” shows the story of a child who becomes ill when he is forced to ride in the family car. As the story progresses, we discover the reason is that this was the car he was in when his father met his mistress on the street, an encounter which made the boy sick to his stomach.

The boy is unwittingly conditioned to throw up every time he gets in the car, which will allow a lesson on the idea of behavioral conditioning, which can then be used to discuss the concept of delayed gratification versus instant gratification, the hook lesson for this unit. As a side area of study, I plan to have my students begin to think about their own brains in psychological terms, hopefully prompting meta-cognitive thought.

All of this will be used to teach the students one important idea. Our parents unwittingly mold us to be a certain way. As we age, as we develop, we have to learn to make our own decisions. We have to either continue the way we are or, if we feel we have been molded badly, we have to make our own conditions, mold ourselves. We have to create our own families--which might be just what a student with a less than ideal family situation needs to hear.


 * V. Drafting a Curriculum Map:**

In addition to a year-long curriculum map, design a map or matrix for each unit within your curriculum with a tentative/proposed timeline. Even if you have to revise (or in my case, completely overhaul) your curriculum map, it’s good to have a solid foundation to start with; and it’s vital to know where you want your instruction to go. Curriculum maps will help to keep your teaching life organized; they will keep you accountable to your students; and they help you to plot out assessments and the most essential skills, knowledge, objectives, and enduring understands in your curriculum.

Sitting down and writing a matrix for each learning unit can be difficult work; but it is always well worth it. Like a curriculum map, a unit matrix outlines the skills, knowledge, objectives, and understandings for each unit. Your matrix should also delineate the material you wish to cover and any essential questions you want your kids to answer within a given time period, with tentative dates for covering material, activities, and assessments. Once you have a matrix for your unit, you will have a good idea what you intend to cover nearly every day for the duration of the unit. Be sure to build in some extra time in case you need to re-teach concepts, or in the event that you need to add or change something to meet your kids’ needs. Always have goals and objectives for your kids before you start designing a matrix—the matrix should be a road map to meeting those goals and objectives.

Click here to view a blank curriculum map, click here: Click here to view a sample unit matrix, click here:


 * VI. Determine your resource needs:**

One of the things I was most confident about this year was the first novel I selected to read with my students as a class (that is, once I realized I HAD to read one with them pronto). I chose //A Lesson Before Dying//, by Ernest Gaines. (click here to view my rationale.) I was sure my kids would love it; and I knew the book would afford the opportunity for great interdisciplinary lessons on slavery, emancipation, and the Jim Crow era in American history. As I scoured the internet for visual materials, I found that PBS has an incredible website with online tools and resources. The website is an offshoot of the five-part PBS series, The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. [|click here to view the website.] Although PBS no longer sells the series on DVD, the website offers a free twenty-minute video on the Elaine Riot in Arkansas.

I was able to download the short video, and I was ready to play it for my students in class. I popped my flash drive into the USB port of my DOE laptop--but the video would not play. As it turns out, my laptop was among several newly purchased units that does not include [|realPlayer]. I spent the next ten minutes scrambling for an older laptop with the necessary software while a colleague watched my class. I prayed that my principal--whose office was conveniently situated directly across the hall--would not arbitrarily stop by for a visit.

As you plan your unit, consider the following: What resources and materials will you need to carry out your lessons, activities, and assessments? Will you need computers and internet access? What software or applications do you need? Will you need an overheard or LCD projector? What about saving students work? Will you need USB drives? How many books will you need? This may sound like common sense; but it's easy to forget to plan for resources when you're designing a unit. Determining your resource-and-material needs before you implement your unit will keep you from last-minute scurrying (or in many cases, begging) for the items you need to effectively carry out your lessons and activities.


 * VII. Assessments:**

Tests can be nerve-racking for both students and teachers. A good assessment should challenge students and give them an opportunity to demonstrate their learning and understanding. The unfortunate truth is that New York State will measure the learning of all our students by their performance on one exam—the Regents. But this does not mean that we have to do the same in our classrooms. Although those who teacher grades nine through 11 (typically) are responsible for preparing students for the Regents, we do not need to assess our students with multiple-choice exams and critical-lens essays after every unit.

Look for creative alternatives to assessing your students, and whenever possible, design your own authentic assessments. Do not fear project-based assessments. Yes, they can be difficult to create; and yes, you will likely have to design your own rubric if it’s an original project that you’ve designed for your kids. As an alternative, you may consider a hybrid assessment that is part exam and part product to allow the greatest number of students to reflect upon, practice, and demonstrate to you what they know and understand (Tomlinson, 2001). To view a creative, project-based assessment on the concept of utopia as reflected in the novel, //The Giver//, by Lois Lowry, click here: To view the rubric, click here:

When you do choose to administer a Regents-style assessment, use it as an opportunity to help your students understand the directions and criteria for evaluation. Make rubrics accessible for your students. The following rubric is modeled after a critical-lens Regents essay. The language in each category has been modified so that all students will understand what will be expected of them: Click here to view a modified critical-lens essay rubric, click here:

Remember, you should be evaluating your students based on concepts, skills, and essential questions you covered with them in class. Theoretically, everything you have done in class should be preparation for an assessment you had envisioned when you began the unit.

References:

Burke, J. (2008). //The English Teacher's Companion//. Heinmann. Portsmouth, NH Smagorinsky, P. (2008). //Teaching English by design: How to create and carry out instructional Units.// //Heinmann.// Porthsmouth, NH McTighe, J. & Wiggins, G. (2005). //Understanding by Design.// ASCD. Alexandria, VA Moll, L., Amanti, C., Neff, D. and Gonzalez, N. (2001). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory Into Practice, XXXI, 2, 132-141. Tomlinson, C.A. //How to differentiate instruction in mixed-ability classrooms//. ASCD. Alexandria, VA The rise and fall of Jim Crow: Retrieved on 4/25/10 from: __http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/tools_riot.html__