Tell me about your curriculum...(part info seeking, part vent)

How detailed is your curriculum? Is it heavily scripted? Do you have a scope and sequence?

I am asking because I am getting increasingly frustrated with things at my school. We have no real curriculum; the lit. coach was supposed to write one but all we got was September (which I, incidentally, wrote).

I am a city teacher and I know many of you have issues with heavily scripted stuff and micromanagement (which I understand) But the opposite extreme is no good either. I have an infant at home and am swamped. I don't feel that it's my job as the teacher to write curriculum, unless it's as part of a team and I get release time or something. This month the coach said, "Oh, do short stories this month" and I wanted to say, OK, what does THAT mean. I just spend a lot of time

Re: Tell me about your curriculum...(part info seeking, part vent)

yeah ours is really scripted though we are supposed to be more flexible now that we are not doing TC.

Its annoying.

and then the best is we got laptops to intergrate technology into the classroom.. yeah OKAY how? we are supposed to have reading, writing, math etc a certain amount of times a week. And how do they suggest i intergrate it when everything is so scripted?

I feel your pain

Re: Tell me about your curriculum...(part info seeking, part vent)

I know what you mean. I went from being in a Catholic School on LI to being in a TC-affiliated public school in NC. It's been one extreme to the other. I honestly kinda LIKED not having curriculum--I was given the freedom to do whatever I wanted, and I did. This year, everything is so jam-packed into my day, that I don't get to actually spend any quality time with my kids.

Re: Tell me about your curriculum...(part info seeking, part vent)

When we did TC, we had a monthly calendar that we followed. For instance, March was nonfiction reading and writing, so we had created a calendar wtih key points to focus on and therefore, we went around that. It sucked but by year three, you had everything you needed and that's when they changed the curriculum.

Now we have treasures which is overwhelming b/c there is SOOO much that you reall just have to pick and choose. But it covers everything!

Re: Tell me about your curriculum...(part info seeking, part vent)

i'm on LI.... our curriculum is not heavily scripted. we are given an outline fo what needs to be covered in each subject for the year and we go off of that.... many teachers use pieces of TC or TERC math, but it's not all they do. we use whatever resources we want to teach the matieral. it lets us teach the way our particular class needs to be taught. i like having the structure of knowing what i need to cover, but having the autonomy to do it in the way i see fit/believe that works.

Message edited 11/3/2007 1:35:47 PM.