Creating a Coherent Curriculum
Problems Involved With Making Curricular Decisions in High School
Many high schools offer English teachers textbooks, workbooks and a choice of novels designated by grade level to utilize. Aside from books from which to teach, however, they are often not given guidelines as to what to teach. The closest thing to a high school curriculum guide in Florida, for example, is the Florida Sunshine State Standards. Although these benchmarks dictate skills to be taught, they do not specify content. Especially for new teachers, the task of selecting content to teach while determining how to teach is daunting.
Knowledge is Power
Teachers passionately communicate to students that “knowledge is power.” The idea of intellectual capital is not new: the more an individual knows, the more effectively she will participate in society and fulfill her potential. With the stakes being so high on knowledge, one would expect that determining what individuals should learn in school would be a prominent objective of education.
Who Makes Curricular Decisions?
However, many states leave curricular decisions up to individual schools and, oftentimes, the schools leave the ultimate decisions to the teachers, who often have little training in developing curriculum. For 9th grade teachers in particular, this poses a unique challenge as one high school can have eight or more feeder middle schools, not to mention a constant influx of transient students entering from other states as well as other countries.
Teachers Must Access Prior Knowledge... But How?
In his discussion of helping students increase their intellectual capital, E.D. Hirsch points out in The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them [Anchor, 1999] that, “psychological research has shown that the ability to learn something new depends on an ability to accommodate the new thing to the already known” (23). This requires that for teachers to effectively access students’ prior knowledge, they must be familiar with what all students already know. The notion that students learn best when they can attach new information to previously existing “Velcro hooks” is popular in discussions and textbooks of graduate education classes.
This is an effective teaching practice, as discussion and examples which relate to topics students already know stimulates student interest and sets the tone for learning new, but related, information. In a school system which lacks a common, coherent curriculum, the problem arises quickly: how does a teacher access prior knowledge of students who have such an enormously diverse educational background? How many analogies, for instance, can an English teacher give related to novels students may or may not have read, just trying to hit the mark of the majority in the classroom?
Repetitive Curriculum Frustrates Students
Accessing prior knowledge in every student is impossible; thus, many teachers give more general examples of, say, direct and indirect characterization. This practice causes two negative effects: teachers feel like they need to reinvent the wheel to get all of their students on the same page before delving into new material, and some students will inevitably be bored or confused by over-generalized examples when specific ones are too limited for students who have been exposed to divergent literature.
This leads to redundancy in the curriculum. Hirsch explains that spiraling is “universally experienced by students as boring repetition, as in the oft-heard complaint from those who have been made to read Charlotte’s Web three times in six grades” (29). This experience frustrates even the most motivated learner, but for students who already experience a deficit of educational experience at home, they must feel like they are being cheated! It is up to educators to draw attention to this vital issue and promote positive change.
