Moving forward into the past?

smallbarnWhen I started this blog a few months ago, one of the first entries was about an upcoming decision our school district is to make about our ELA program. I want to use this space to think again about the decision so I can have some clarity about it. Maybe it will spur you to think in some way about your situation, or cause you to think of how you might help me think more clearly.

Our current position
Our district once used two basal reading series (K-5). Though the decision happened before my time in the district, I’m told we had two series because K-5 could not come to a consensus on what series to order. More facts: by my rough count, twenty-one of thirty-two classroom teachers and two of seven special needs teachers were around to use these series. The remaining teachers are either experienced, new to the district teachers, or early career teachers.

Three years ago the district decided to purchase a Scholastic Books guided reading book room in an effort to get more small group reading instruction, and to have trade books for children to read rather than the guided reading rooms that use more contrived books. We adopted the Daily Five as a literacy block management system, and started to learn the CAFÉ through self-created professional development. We have no curriculum director, nor a standing (paid) curriculum committee to help us focus or do ground-work for our decision-making. We have no long-term literacy committee structure, or curriculum committee. We’ve convened these kinds of committees on an ad hoc basis.

Last year the school board decided the major focus of our activity would be to map curriculum district-wide. While important work, this effort took us away from our literacy focus, and soaked up our time. We started to map English Language Arts (ELA), but, after much agony we realized that we didn’t have the capacity to complete that work at all grade levels without some kind of assistance beyond those grade level teams.

SpottyonstyleThe pressure mounts
As a result of all these decisions, for the last three years we’ve been without a clear, coherent ELA curriculum at the K-5 level. Each teacher and grade level has been doing what it can to pull together materials and decide on what we will teach based on the knowledge we have about literacy at our grade levels. We’re aware, though, that this is slapdash and inadequate. Layer that knowledge with the curriculum mapping work, and you can see that it’s been a lot of work and is burning people out. The status quo is not sustainable, and isn’t heading anywhere right now. Another year of limbo would not be good for morale.

The basal decision?
One way that has been advanced as a way to relieve the pressure is to buy a basal series. This would give teachers a clear set of skills to teach, and a scope and sequence for teaching them. Basals are great at appearing to be “complete”, and definitely give teachers many skills to teach.

After Herculean efforts for three years, with no real end in sight and the knowledge that we can’t do this alone, the basal approach seems to be getting new traction. In some ways, this whole decision reminds me of the old Soviet Union. (I was an historian at one time.) The old “Soviet-style” one-size-instruction-fits-all, which was the old basal series, imploded from its own irrelevance to the needs of our students, and it chafed at enough teachers’ philosophies to cause us to jettison it. This new basal-less freedom was not well-planned, or supported, however, so it devolved into a kind of chaos. This turmoil is now causing some to look back on the certainty and authority of a basal series with no small bit of longing.

To compound that, we don’t have a clear decision-making structure in place, nor have we, in my opinion, sufficiently built our knowledge of how students learn to read and write. There are several teachers and administrators who believe what we need is the kind of clearly laid out skill instruction that a basal provides. And there are many people who just want there to be something in place so we have some coherence across the grade levels; so they don’t have to second-guess themselves all the time; and so they aren’t constantly grubbing for materials to use to teach their classes.

What happens when…?Immersion
My problem is this: What happens to a teacher when he becomes increasingly skeptical of the connection between teaching, at least skills teaching, and learning? I’ve always been someone who enjoys learning and who throws himself into it. After having observed learners for a few years now, I’m convinced I’m not an exception, but the rule. It is hard for me to see the move back to a basal as anything but an easy solution to a difficult problem, one that won’t, in the long-term, help us get to where we need to get. I’m not the only one. There is a significant minority of teachers and administrators who worry that the basal approach might yield short-term relief at the expense of long-term vision.

In the next post, I’m going to explore some criteria that I’m thinking of laying out to “the powers that be” to see if we can have a longer-term vision for literacy in our district, while still dealing with the anxieties of being curriculum-less.

One thought on “Moving forward into the past?

  1. Pingback: Trying to be a “Force for Good”

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