TASK #1

Curriculum is a set of goals to reach, has standards and objectives and contains what students should know or learn when they are a certain point of their schooling. And it is usually dictated upon teachers, and teachers have little or no room to go around it. As I grow up in morocco the curriculum was the priority of each Education secretary since the departure of the French. But little was done about they changed the covers and the tittles, but the content was conflicting as it could be, a curriculum designed for French students was made to be universal and that caused so many problems. And for years and years teachers haven’t stopped complaining about the rigidity of the curriculum but at the same never changed a word of it or taught any differently. I remember when the teachers were so terrified by the unannounced visits of the district’s supervisors, and the first thing they asked for is “are you aligned with the curriculum?” “Show me lesson plans for the last week” and all that the supervisor did is go through the paperwork and make sure that teacher is teaching what he is supposed to, and he never paid attention to the quality of instructions. The quantity was there all of the time but the quality may be not. The curriculum and the stress of following it by the word was the teachers’ nightmare most of the time.

From my position as a world language teacher I would say that I am grateful to even have any type of curriculum, and the reason why I said so is because for the 4 years that I worked as bilingual teacher, during that time I had little or no guidance from our previous world language expert. I was “left behind”. I use to spend my sad Sunday afternoons wondering about what I will teach for the next week and usually my plans lacked coherence and long term goals. I was taking it one week at the time. And it all changed when I was sent to France as part of a summer academy where I was exposed to unit design and backward design, and since then things had bee so different for me. As a world language I see that the interdisciplinary approach is what fits me because it presents a holistic approach to teaching languages as my students will be engaged and I will be reinforcing what they are leering in their regular classrooms since it is content based curriculum. The curriculum that we are working on developing in Jefferson County gives us more room for designing creativities that meet the needs of our students, and also designed to have the teacher as a facilitator and not a dictator. Honestly with this model I plan the lesson and watch the students conduct it. And as wigging said as educators our job” is to help students play the game and not play the game for them”.

I do agree with wiggings's idea as whole. We need a new look at the curriculum, a curriculum that fosters teaching students how to think instead of loading with information that they are not able to understand or process, a curriculum that gets the students engaged and makes them feel that they own what they learned, instead of feeling that they owe it to the teachers, a curriculum that teaches the students how to search for information instead of finding it for them. And I can see the importance of such a curriculum when I look back at how I was taught and how now I am teaching. I see the difference between memorizing and exploring. I see the difference between a disconnected curriculum and a coherent one. The 21st century learners need a curriculum that is geared towards the use of technology and less memorization and none- meaningful teaching.