Sunday, August 06, 2006

Managed Curriculum Adoption The other day I completed a week-long workshop on  SpringBoard, a managed curriculum developed by The College Board--yes, the testing people. We are adopting both the Math and Language  Arts curricula at my high school and at 3 other high schools in the district. I took the Language Arts workshop. Pluses: I think it is a well-developed program, full of good strategies and activities that attempt to get students prepared for the type of critical thinking and problem-solving skills they will need  in college. A lot of the strategies are the very ones I use as an ESOL teacher.  SpringBoard is aligned with the College Board's standards as well as your state standards. In fact, an online portion that includes planning tools for teachers makes it very user friendly and aligns every single activity in every unit to a state standard. (Good for those of us who are requuired to cite standards in our weekly lesson plans!) Minuses: Accomplished teachers who are seasoned at putting rigor into their courses and motivating students with meaningful lessons would not find it necessary. They might feel that they had been robbed of their pedagogical liberty. Teachers of gifted or advanced students have said that they think it is not challenging enough for their students. (Apparently SpringBoard is a slightly less rigorous variation of College Board's Pacesetter curriculum.) I would have loved to have had SpringBoard as a new teacher, to save me from having to re-invent the wheel, as every new teacher has to do. Sadly, I must say that our district wasted millions of dollars on a literature textbook adoption from McDougal-Littell just last year. The McDougal-Littell materials are excellent, but they will now become merely supplementary to the Springboard curriculum. Par for the course for our district's money management practices. 10:25:23 PM    comment []trackback []