I’ve always struggled to follow a curriculum. My first year of teaching, my fellow teacher newbie and I visited our new school a week before we had to report to get some materials and start planning for the first month of school. Our math coach placed the teacher’s guide for our school’s math curriculum in front of us and began narrating how a typical lesson would go, her finger tapping at the top of each page as she went. It felt sterile, void of life, indifferent to the human children that would be learning from its pages. The next week, I remember giving it a go like she’d shown us, playing the video that went along with the lesson, only to shut it off as the cartoon character’s high-pitched voice made me (and my third graders) cringe.
“Enough of that,” I said, and the students breathed a sigh of relief. So began my journey into developing my own curriculum for my students.
I had an assistant principal that year who, though not entirely helpful for much else, did say something wise about curriculum guides during one grade-team meeting: “The teachers guides are like a script, but you are the actors. You make it come alive.”
Corny metaphor aside, I saw what she meant. We weren’t meant to teach from the guide. We weren’t meant to have them in our laps as we spoke to the children, glancing down to make sure we were saying everything “correctly.”
Fast forward six years later, and teachers guides for me are just that: guides. Supports. A jumping off point when you’re not sure where to begin. The real planning? That comes from my heart, from what I am passionate about, and from that year’s students’ strengths and interests and passions.
I’m a creator, and creating is part of why I love teaching so much. Even in the grades that I’ve taught more than once, I’ve rarely taught the same lesson or unit in the same way twice. With each year repeating a grade, what I actually gain is more confidence and expertise in the content, the landmark skills that I know my students need to learn in order to be successful in their future academic careers. Additionally, I’ve witnessed my growth as a teacher by seeing the shifts in which “subject area” I focus on developing professionally. My first three years, it was math. My fourth and fifth, integrated studies and themed, project-based learning units, with a hint of writing revolution (Judith Hochman). All intertwined heavily with multilingual language-learning, as I was teaching in dual language classrooms at the time.
This year, I’m finally focusing on writing, thanks to a colleague, mentor, and friend who is pushing me professionally and personally (ahem… this blog). I find myself once again looking at curriculum guides for Teacher’s College Writer’s Workshop units and setting them aside in favor of creating my own units based on what I see my students needing and wanting.
This winter’s informational writing unit was a big success, for me and for my fifth graders. I grew in helping students to set and achieve goals through one-on-one and small group conferencing. A final mini-bend allowed students to transfer their new knowledge to quick-writes about our science content: writing informational brochures on the new Chromebooks, which ended up incredible. And last week’s informational on-demand provided confirmation in the data: almost all of them jumped up half a year to a full year’s growth.
A ready-made curriculum is a map that promises to deliver your students to a certain destination. This year, I tried to follow one of those maps when I taught the realistic fiction unit, only to realize that the path wasn’t the right one for my students. So I continue to take the risk of scanning the map, situating myself in the terrain, and creating new paths, knowing that I have a pretty good sense of direction. And my fifth graders? They’ve reached the destination each time.
Writing With Abandon 