Curriculum

I have been part of the curriculum writing committee for mathematics in the Northern Valley for the past three revisions (a span of fifteen years) and Wiggins and McTigue’s article on what curriculum should accomplish has sparked my interest greatly. I am reading about backward design and it makes a lot of sense to me. Wiggins and McTigue say that when designing curriculum, you must think about your goal, end result, and then look back at the path you need to take to get there; hence, the backward method. By doing this, you are always keeping the end result in mind, making sure that performances requiring understanding will happen. You should ask yourself, “What do I need my students to do in order to prove a certain level of understanding?” While guiding your students along the path toward the desired result, the teacher needs to formulate lessons where students use critical thinking and persistence. I relate this to cooking a meal. When we cook we know what the outcome will be before we begin. Then we go backward and gather the ingredients, do all of the prep work, cook, and present the finished meal. There are no surprises; it is what you were working toward. I don’t think too many people just gather some ingredients and then combine them in some fashion to come up with who knows what kind of meal. The meal itself is thought about first and then the cook works backward to make that result come about. In education, a performance-based curriculum is what is desired for better understanding of content.

As I read further I found a section of the article that stated that many curriculums are a list of concepts with verbs put at the beginning to make them into behavioral objectives. It also states that Bloom’s Taxonomy was never meant to serve as guidelines for instruction. When I think back to the way we wrote curriculum over the past fifteen years, I can see that what I thought was a well organized, thorough process, was not totally true. Sure we took many factors into consideration; content, standards, spiraling across grade levels, language, ways to implement the curriculum, to name a few, what we didn’t do was work backward and we did use Bloom’s Taxonomy as a model for language in the curriculum. I do have to say that we did discuss “the big ideas” and we thought we used them when designing the curriculum, but that’s not what we really did. I guess we were on the right track, but veered off a little. A lot of thought, time and effort went into designing the curriculum, but I know that I use it as a check-off list of concepts to teach over the course of the year. It is up to me to come up with the tasks taken to implement the curriculum, although some suggestions are given in the document. Fie years from now when we redesign the math curriculum, I may have some other suggestion to discuss with the committee due to my knowledge about backward design.