Planning?

Articles such as this one by Heidi Hayes Jacobs remind me of how absurd I find the industry of education as it exists in our country and, it seems, especially in Mississippi (Perhaps I just resent any piece of professional development material that uses the term "21st century" approach) (Jacobs 3).  It brings me back to staff development  sessions where common sense is built up into new ideas that somehow warrant full days of being talked at on how inclusion should really be inclusive and how different students learn different ways, hence differentiated instruction.  Now I learn that it is better to plan ahead and across grade levels than to plan day to day and in isolation and that Ms. Jacobs, who I am sure is very well-educated and knowledgeable, seems to be traveling around charging school districts for workshops to explain her discovery that following a curriculum map is better than wandering like a lost child, as I do, through a desert of frameworks.  The struggle to be a good teacher, and my occasional failures to do so, rarely result from a lack of knowledge about what should be done but rather from a logistical or individual inability to follow through on what one knows to be more sensible.  All that being said, however, let me consider the article's merits and how it relates to my school's planning processes and my plans for planning out the summer curriculum.

Where Jacobs seems to be going beyond simply saying that you should do long-term, micro- and macro-planning, is her idea of it needing to be calendar-based, as she expresses when she writes, "without a commitment to when a skill will be taught, there is no commitment"  (Jacobs 2).  Here, she is contrasting what my school seems to have in place in terms of vertical planning, that is, a list of what students should know in what grade, to what my school perhaps should have, which is a calendar detailing precisely when students were expected to learn what, which, I believe she is arguing, would imply more of an obligation for teachers to get to all of the material that later teachers will expect their students to have learned. Again, this seems sensible enough, but, even though it seems more ideal, I am not sure how it exactly could be imposed without a complete upheaval in what is done with North Panola.  By that I mean that the level of turnover is so high that the stability required for effective vertical planning simply seems not to exist.  Furthermore, in my individual experience, what should have been covered when and how long it should take to cover the next thing seems to be utterly meaningless, at least in my dealings with my remedial math classes.  For me to try to cover all the frameworks that the next teacher expects my students to have learned would ignore the fact that for them to learn anything at all, being as behind as they are, more time is going to have to be spent on any given topic for it to have been worth teaching at all.  In terms of horizontal planning, I have had good experiences with that as my school as the other Algebra teacher at my school is another MTC teacher and we were able to plan out what will be covered when and update that plan frequently throughout the course of the year, albeit with her taking the lead as she is far more organized than I.

In terms of planning Summer 2009, I anticipate fewer obstacles as it hardly resembles, and therefore takes on so few of the problems of, a real school.  That is to say, the students tend to be more motivated to keep up with the material as their family has spent money for them to go and they are already losing their summer to the subject, thereby reducing the problem of topics dragging on forever due to lack of student motivation.  On the other hand, one difficulty is that, while we are expected to cover the same amount of material, we are faced with the difficulty of teaching 4 classes to each group of kids in one day.  Now they may end up taking a fair number of classes, but any subject, and particularly math, takes time to ingest.  4 lessons in one day, I believe, it is not as valuable as 4 effective lessons over 4 days.  The mind needs time to process information, but the curriculum map must still work in the entire curriculum under  constraints.  My plan is to meet with my fellow teacher and discuss ways to blend frameworks as often as possible, so there is both a more holistic approach to the mathematical concepts and an increase in the pace  in which the topics can be addressed.  My goal is to plan out the curriculum of Algebra I, which I anticipate teaching again in the fall, in such a way that accomplishes this blending of frameworks, as well as finds time for projects and a greater number of problem-solving activities, as I feel these were both lacking in my plans for the current year.  Hopefully, the long-term planning I am about to engage in will increase my effectiveness as a teacher next year, as I have found scarcely enough time to do it over the past 6 months.