Standards - the fear of all American teachers ....

For those of you who are not interested in teaching, feel free to tune out for the next few days.  If it was possible, I would blog about the conference and my adventures in Orlando, but alas, there is nothing that has captured my interest in Orlando.  I did try.  I had some tips about bars and restaurants but after finding out the cost of getting to them ($110 return), I decided to save my cash for Miami and throw myself into conference mode.

The conference got off to a flying start with my first session, entitled 'Connecting Understanding by Design, What Works in Schools and Curriculum Mapping: Curriculum for the 21st Century'.  The session consisted of a panel of four big names in education - Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins (UbD), Robert Marzano (WWS) and Heidi Heyes Jacobs (Curriculum Mapping) discussing the notion of curriculum in the 21st century.  Questions were texted or tweeted from the audience and flashed up on a big screen - how very 21st century.  A lot of the questions from the audience were related to standards and pacing guides, something that we are not terribly familiar with in Australia.  The standards issue was huge.  You could feel the tension in the air when they were first mentioned.  Of course, I've been reading about the dramas caused by standards and high stakes testing that's been happening in the US but wasn't really aware of what an enormous impact it is happening in the real world of classroom teachers.  We can only hope that the same panic doesn't occur in Australia with the introduction of the national standards.  A couple of key points that came out of the session:

• What is curriculum?  Grant described it as the best path for achieving long term academic and intellectual goals.  Heidi outlined it as a series of choices, a composition made for real people, in real time.  Robert emphasised the assessed curriculum because it gives the most accurate reflection of what is happening in classrooms.
• Standards (audience shudders).  Grant made the very good point that it is not the teacher who has to meet the standards but that there seems to be the disillusion that if the adults organise the material well, then it will all just happen.  Heidi warned of cherry picking the standards that we like as teachers.  Jay made a great analogy of using the standards in the same way that a builder uses the regulations for building a house - you need to use them but they are not the only thing that is considered.
• The importance of assessment in curriculum.  I fully agreed with Jay's point that assessment must honour the discipline and the 21st century.  Heidi also agreed, commenting that students appear to time travel at school - they come to school and travel back in time (because we are using the same teaching, learning, assessment ideas from long ago) and when they leave school, they return to reality.  Robert introduced the idea of assessing from the inside out.  Students need to take control and show their own learning progression (he uses the term 'learning progressions' quite a lot - I think he is referring to something like a continuum).

The second session I attended was called 'Differentiated Instruction for English Language Learners'.  I chose this because I'm still interested in keeping up-to-date with the 'English as an Additional Language' world.  Firstly, I have an issue with the term, 'English Language Learners' - aren't we all English language learners?  Even as I write this blog, I learn more about the English language.  DI is something that I know a little about (I think I do it) but am not super familiar with the terminology associated with it.  The session really spent most of the time with discussions about the statistics of students speaking languages other than English and how hard it was for them, along with the most basic suggestions for helping them in the mainstream classroom.  I should have chosen another session.

The third session was called 'Understanding by Design in Early Childhood'.  Here, I was hoping to pick up some new ideas for teaching six year old R.  The session was interesting.  I learnt a lot more about the world of early childhood (which still scares me a little) and picked up some ideas for wording essential questions for younger students. 

My biggest lesson for today was ..... choose 'big idea' sessions that make you think rather than the more concrete 'this is how you do it' sessions because American education certainly seem to be a long way behind the schools and the educators that I have had the privilege of working in and with.  

Again, apologies to those of you who are not used to or interested in my educational rants.  In a few days, I'll be in Miami with plenty of 'normal' things to blog about.