Teach the Curriculum or Teach the Child?

 By Tracey

Do you every get emails like this from your principal?

I would like to find time to visit with you and Mr. P (the other 5th grade teacher) about your desire not to send students to the specialist for math interventions. I would like to understand your rationale and to hear your plans for addressing the needs of your students. It is my expectation that when teachers aren’t happy with how things are going, then a team approach to addressing specific concerns makes more sense, especially when it comes to math. By team, I mean the math specialist, math coach, assistant principal and myself.

I got one of these just last week.  In fact, I got this exact email.  I'll admit I was a bit jittery when it first arrived in my inbox.  As I read it again now, I see the professionalism and concerned tone of my principal. I like my principal, and I think we have good rapport.  But the fear of being called down to the principal's office has never quite gone away.  

This email was inspired by some miscommunication.  Let's be honest, isn't that the cause of most problems that arise?  Mr. P and I had split up our students and agreed to teach a 30-day leveled curriculum on multiplication.  We sent eight of our highest needs students to the specialist to get curriculum A, I took the next group and taught curriculum B, and Mr. P took the "high" group and taught curriculum C.  This configuration was suggested by our math specialist, and we agreed to try it before ever seeing the curriculum.  But as the days wore on, Mr. P and I noticed problems.  

The curriculum didn't match what the students needed.  Curriculum B insulted my students' intelligence, creeping along at a banana slug's pace, repeating games they had played as fourth graders, asking them to recreate multiplication charts and highlight patterns to ad nauseam.  I felt embarrassed each day asking the students to do the activities.  Mr. P abandoned it entirely and began teaching multiplication and long division algorithms. When we talked to the specialist, she agreed but questioned why the students performed so poorly on the pre-assessment.  If this is too easy for them, then they should have done better.  So, we continued for four weeks, then called it quits.  For our next round of math interventions, Mr. P and I decided to do things differently.  We would teach the kids, not the curriculum.

The meeting that resulted from this decision wasn't too uncomfortable or awkward.  My principal wanted to understand what led us to change the math intervention, and she gave us time to explain.  Our ideas for a new configuration would involve having the math specialist come to our classrooms twice a week, instead of pulling the same students out each day.  We would put together resources to teach our students, addressing their specific needs.  Isn't that what good teachers do?  But there's an accountability issue.  Just as I'm held accountable for how my students do, my principal is held accountable for the curriculum she purchases.  And she bought a lot of math intervention curriculum.  What I didn't know, was Mr. P and I don't have the freedom to make decisions about what will best serve our students.  The curriculum was purchased to bring their test scores up.  And it must be implemented as it was prescribed by the team.  I just wish the teacher had been a part of that team decision.  Now, I'm being asked to teach the curriculum, not the child.  And I'm accountable for the results.

Comments

[Tracey]

Kristin, the insight you made about the bully approach is disheartening, but unfortunately true. And I think it's because of what Tom said, that some teachers don't make wise choices about their instruction. I'm not positive I would have on my own, either. It's hard to tailor your lessons everyday. And when you're faced with dwindling time to plan and collaborate with others because of all the other demands that are made, quality instruction is made so much more challenging.

It seems to me that everyone is looking for the easy answer. If we just buy X curriculum, and do everything it says, we'll have students who score well on math tests. But it's never that easy. What frustrates me is that email was the first time I was ever aware there even was a team. If there really were a team, why am left to do all the work? The math specialist comes in to help certain students twice a week for 30 minutes, but no one else. If I ran a school, it would all be so different. But, I guess that's another post.

[Kristin]

I think it's ridiculous that you don't get to design the curriculum that fits the needs of your students. The packaged curriculum approach is just so meaningless, and it's a short-sighted attempt to have something done well.

I suppose Tom is right - many teachers aren't great math teachers. Maybe that's part of their own educational weaknesses or maybe it's that differentiating math is so much harder than differentiating the humanities. I can ask one child to identify a character's dreams and another child to argue the main theme of a novel, but what do you do when one child's ready for algebra and another doesn't know that -2 + 2 = 0?

We should never be held hostage by the fact some administrator spent money on worthless curriculum. The team approach should have been taken when the staff was trying to solve the problem of low math scores. What you got was a team approach to bully you into teaching something that makes no sense.

[Mark]

BUT, you're right, Tracey: you should have been involved with the curricular decisions from the beginning. Teachers ought to be part of the team.

[Mark]

I wonder if these conferences happen at the high school level? There's very much a lone-dog approach, it seems, at the high school level and though such a meeting might be intimidating (or even insulting) it at least illustrates an attempt at instructional leadership on the part of the admin.

[Tom]

I think one of the biggest, yet unspoken problems that administrators face is that some teachers, when given the freedom to choose the best curriculum for their students, make wise choices that advance student learning. Other teachers, when given this freedom, put together a series of 180 neat math activites with no direction and no coherence. So principals have to decide whether to hold back teachers like you and Mr. P as the price to pay in order to keep certain teachers from making disasterous decisions.