I'm not talking 'scripted curriculum', I'm talking shared lesson plans. There's a raging discussion at WaPo and Ed Week based on a column by Jay Matthews. Here's his opening:
New teacher decries lesson plan gap
Maybe Bruce Friedrich raised the lesson plan issue because he was so out of sync with the recent college graduates who were the other Teach for America instructors at his Baltimore high school. He was 40. He had switched to education after first running a homeless shelter and then working for animal rights.
He thought it was odd that despite the forward-looking reputation of the Baltimore district and Teach for America, beginning teachers still had to construct their lessons from scratch, as teachers have done for centuries. They were shown samples of the state tests their students would have to take. They were told where they might find good material. But as rookies, they had little idea which of a million possible options would work.
“There were no exemplary lesson plans, no recommended class activities, nothing,” he said.
Friedrich asked about this at every faculty meeting and every conference with his Teach for America adviser. He learned that many teachers, and the organizations that represent them, don’t want ready-made lesson plans. They feel it limits their creativity and turns them into robots doing whatever their department head or the district curriculum chief wants.
Friedrich began teaching in 2009 and had a splendid two years in Teach for America. His second year he was named the school’s outstanding teacher. But he still doesn’t understand why the district didn’t try to save him and other novices from many beginner’s mistakes by offering the best lesson plan possible for each subject.
I bristle too at the idea of 'canned' lessons, but I very much value the units and approaches I have happily stolen many of them. What do you all think?
Responses
I am not knee jerk against lesson plans or any kind of template. In fact I use as my freshman comp text Graff and Berkenstein's They Say, I Say which has as its premise the idea that templates are a part of the 'moves' of all academic writing. Anybody who reads the NYT editorial boards knows that none of that would get written without a template of sorts. And I don't mind that school principals want these. What I do mind is that the plans are not accompanied by time to reflect on what worked and what didn't. And I do mind that lesson plans are the tail that wags the learning dog. Adult learning and on the job training experts like Jay Cross and Charles Jennings argue that most of what a lesson plan amounts to accounts for only 10% of the l learning that goes on in learners' heads. So...lesson plans are, as Miracle Max in The Princess Bride said, "only mostly dead."
Great point. If you have a chance, talk more about Jay Cross and Charless Jennings.
Yes, I will but just to throw out two resources:
Jay Cross's excellent book Informal Learning and even better for visual folk like me, his informal learning poster.
Charles Jennings' blog, Performance Through Learning Innovation and his three part series in ILT&S on the 70:20:10 'rule'
What these blokes are doing is what Digital IS in particular and the whole NWP has always pushed for --peer to peer learning, hallway knowledge, twitter PD, "cancelled session" sessions. What they point to is the not so hidden little secret about schools at every level--not much gets done. Why? Because our institutional foundations were poured for a 19th century steam powered learning ecology. And much more tellingly, perhaps that model didn't really work very well for folks then either.
I am probably reducing this too much, but I think that while both of these guys are into adult, post-school, learning that they are actually pointing all the way down the hiearchy to Kindergarten and saying we've got the wrong end of the 21st century learning stick.
I have just gotten the opportunity to begin to publish resources on Digital IS so I am definitely going to address this issue in one of those. Thanks for responding and thanks for your work with NWP, truly 21st century leadership.