Curriculum In Focus Presentation

Look around you. In this room are the living hopes and dreams of the students of more than a hundred teachers. Some fifteen thousand students. In this room are these children's first experience experimenting with dry ice, first simulated space mission, discovering density, metamorphosis, and the properties of life itself. Our students need us.

We need each other. Six years ago, middle school science teachers in Oakland decided to support one another in the best way we knew how. We met on our own time, in our own classrooms and shared the activities that brought science to life in our classrooms. These Walkabouts occurred for five years, and served hundreds of teachers. We built a learning community.

When Eileen Engel told me about the grant she had, we saw a chance to draw that community together to build something bigger than a monthly sharing session. We saw a chance to begin a process to create a solid common instructional framework for Oakland science students.

A call went out to all schools. Can the teachers who attended one or more of our planning sessions raise your hands?

You are going to see in the next day or so what we have begun.

We have a new textbook, and tomorrow we will spend the afternoon with a publisher's rep reviewing that text. We also have state science standards. And we have a mandate from our District to align our instruction with the standards. But each of us has to work the magic of making these standards live in the minds of our students, and we felt we needed more than a textbook to do this.

Our goal is to create a guide to science instruction that will serve teachers who are new, and those of us who are experienced as well. For the new teachers, we are providing concrete lessons and activities tied to the standards and the textbooks. For the experienced teachers, we are providing a baseline set of objectives and concepts we hope all will teach, and in agreeing to teach the same material, we create the basis for sharing and learning from one another.

We will all be taking part in the Standards in Practice model. Our work provides teachers new and old with standards-based lessons and assignments. As we strengthen these and develop better assignments, rubrics and projects, they will be shared as well, so we can all raise the level of education we are providing for our children.

The coherence of our curriculum allows resources to flow to our classrooms. When everyone is doing a different curriculum, we can't go to the District and say "We need these things for proper science instruction." When we say "All sixth graders will be studying geology and need rock samples," we can and will have those rock samples purchased for that instruction.

We have learned as teachers that our expectations can have a powerful effect on our students. When we expect little we get little. The same thing occurs with our district. We need to get beyond the cynicism that says the district never does anything worthwhile. This actually lets the district off the hook. This project has moved forward because of the full sponsorship by the District's Division of Teaching and Learning, and the District's NSF grant. We would not be here using District buyback days, being paid with District funds, if the district did not believe in this process. In return, we need to raise our expectations of what the district can and should do for us.

Today you will get a binder with the first unit of instruction for your grade level. You will also get a kit of materials to do the key activities in that unit.

Most importantly, you are being given an invitation to join a process. If you like having these materials, realize it has taken six months of work on the part of this team of teachers to put them in your hands. Every six weeks or so, we plan to issue a new unit of curriculum for each grade level, offer a new training, and a new kit of materials to be given in exchange for the previous one. These units are not done yet, and will be finished in the months to come by the teachers in this room. As each unit is done, it will be posted on the project web site. Our work has just begun, and there are teams working at each grade level that need your help, whether you are a first year teacher or a twenty year veteran.

Even at year's end though, when we have a set of curriculum guides that run through the year, our work will not be done. Each of you is a creative part of improving our curriculum. You can take this material and use it as it is given to you, but most of you will develop activities, assignments, rubrics and resources that go beyond these starting points. Think of the treasure we will have if we all pool these efforts. We will do this through monthly meetings, and through things submitted and published on the web site.

Our fifteen thousand students need more than any one of us can give them. As they learn from us, we can learn from each other, and begin to better meet their needs.