Curriculum Outcomes

After reading Lorraine Ozar's Creating A Curriculum That Works, Chapters 1 - 4, it made me go back to our school's SLE's and take another hard look at what we had written. This is our planning year for next year's WASC visit. As a faculty, we worked long and hard on these. We had originally written these a number of years ago and have adjusted each year as was necessary. As teachers, we all needed to remember that student outcomes are written from the student's point of view, not the teacher's. Using Bloom's Taxonomy, we came up with outcomes that identify what students are to learn and how students will demonstrate what has been learned. We spent a lot of time working on these. We had many discussions as a faculty when writing these as to whether we were writing a goal or if what we were writing were truly outcomes. It was then time to start collecting different samples of student's work to show the specific learning that was taking place. These student samples were filed in each classroom's SLE evidence box. It was quite a process and only made our curriculum that much better with more active learning taking place.

With formal classroom observations, each teacher needs to write up a formal lesson plan where the lesson outcome (objective) is clearly stated. The pre-observation visit includes discussion on the objective to see if it is clearly stated from a student's point of view with both a written and a verbal explanation as to how the objective will be reached. Is the objective a true statement of what the teacher would like the student to learn and the methods to be taken to help students learn that objective? For some faculty members this isn't always an easy job as many continue to think more in the traditional lesson planning instead of selecting the desired outcome first and then the curriculum is created to support the desired outcome. For those who have been in the educational field for many years, this has been quite an adjustment, almost reversing what they had been taught and had done for many years.