Posted by Leo Casey
on July 5, 2012. From Shanker Institute web site.
Leo Casey, UFT vice president for
academic high schools, will succeed Eugenia Kemble as executive director
of the Albert Shanker Institute, effective this fall.
“You want me to teach this stuff, but
I don’t have the stuff to teach.” So opens “Lost at Sea: New Teachers’
Experiences with Curriculum and Assessment,” a 2002 paper by Harvard University researchers about
the plight of new teachers trying to learn the craft of teaching in the face of
insubstantial curriculum frameworks and inadequate instructional materials.
David Kauffman, Susan Moore Johnson
and colleagues interviewed a diverse collection of first- and second-year
teachers in Massachusetts who reported that, despite state academic standards
widely acknowledged to be some of the best in the country, they received
“little or no guidance about what to teach or how to teach it. Left to their
own devices they struggled day to day to prepare content and materials. The
standards and accountability environment created a sense of urgency for these
teachers but did not provide them with the support they needed.”
I found myself thinking about this
recently when I realized that, with the advent of the Common Core State
Standards, new teachers won’t be the only ones in this boat. Much of the
country is on a fast-track toward implementation, but with little thought about
how to provide teachers with the “stuff” – aligned professional development,
curriculum frameworks, model lesson plans, quality student materials, formative
assessments, and so on – that they will need to implement the standards well.
Many veteran educators will make do
by stitching together tried and true lessons in new and different ways. Others
will be scrambling to find quality materials with which to plug holes, as well
as rethinking approaches to old content in order to meet new learning
objectives. And many, as the article says, will be “lost at sea.”
