How having a concrete starting point is crucial for pedagogical improvement
One of the most poorly understood phrases in history is ‘Survival of the fittest’.
Most people think that when Darwin used this phrase, he was referring to ‘fit’ as in strong, healthy, or agile.
This is incorrect. Darwin actually meant ‘fit’ as in ‘adapted to fit’. Those animals that are most fitted to their environment are the ones that survive.
After the recent EdThread, ‘It’s the curriculum, Stupid! a question was posed to me by Craig Barton as follows, ‘But if a school aims commence their improvement journey by fixing their curriculum, won’t that mean they spend way too long on that and don’t get to other key areas?’
This made me realise that I needed to add some more info to clarify what I was trying to say in that post.
In the same way that the word ‘fit’ has multiple meanings, so does the word ‘fix’.
In no way do I think that schools should ‘fix’ their curriculum resources before any other improvement initiative if by ‘fix’ we mean, ‘make state-of-the-art’.
But I do think that schools should ‘fix’ their curriculum resources at a relatively early stage of an improvement journey where to ‘fix’ means to ‘prescribe, share, and set in place’.
What this means is agreeing on which worked examples, student work samples, images, narratives, questions and assessments we will use to communicate concepts then check for understanding of them.
The point is not to get it completely right the first time, the point is to have a concrete starting point from which to improve. This improvement can then take place through iterative cycles that occur in tandem with a focus on other areas (behaviour, formative assessment, etc).
Without curriculum resources fixed in place, teachers end up speaking in generalities. A department member might say, ‘I taught that with a worked example’, ignoring the fact that every other teacher in the department has a different understanding of what that term, ‘worked example’, means.
Even if we do have a shared understanding of what a ‘worked example’ is, the exact set of worked examples that are chosen, the exact way that they are explicated, and the exact way that checks for understanding are conducted, all have enormous impacts on student learning.
Instead of talking in vague generalities, we need to be able to talk in specifics.
Having prescriptive and shared curriculum resources is one of the ingredients of high performing schools. Without it, we’re adrift in a world world of ambiguity.
So, if we’re serious about school improvement, we need to think carefully about ‘fixing’ our curriculum resources. This means fixing them in place, establishing a solid bedrock, and a springboard, for incremental improvement.
Announcements and Opportunities
It finally came! After three months of waiting, getting stuck in customs twice, and on the coldest day in five years, a big pile of boxes full of The Classroom Management Handbook, finally arrived on my doorstep!
Thanks to those several hundred people who have already ordered and have been patiently waiting for these to hit Aussie shores for Mark and I to be able to post to you!
If you’d like a signed copy (and you’re based in Australia) you can grab one here! I’ll do a post out this weekend : )
And don’t forget about the July 23rd Instructional Coaching Training that the redoubtable Josh Goodrich and Harry Fletcher-Wood are flying over for! It’s going to be a phenomenal day!