The map of my discontent

Sigh!

Last year, I was invited to join a group of world language teachers to pilot a curriculum map for the district. (You can go here or here if you want to build some schema) Of course, I was flattered and quickly accepted, for there were only eight of us hand-picked for our little group. Not concerned that I had no idea what this project was about, my ego puffed up at the notion that I would be working on a district-level project.

At our first meeting with Jeanne, the head of the world languages department, we eight educators watched a video, read-up on and discussed the fundamentals of curriculum maps. Here is an overview of how a map works. Educators, over a predetermined course of time (most logically a year) collect data about what they do in the classroom. The data is then analyzed to determine gaps and redundancies of instruction in order to streamline curriculum both horizontally and vertically among grade levels. Mapping is continuous in the never-ending quest to maximize student achievement. Here is a graphic organizer that illustrates the phases of mapping as I came to understand it at that meeting.




This is great! I thought. The people in charge must have noticed how well my students perform on the big district assessment every year, so they want to learn how it's done. That evening I couldn't contain my joy, so I went right to work mapping the exploratory French class I taught every trimester. I attached it to an e-mail and delivered it to Jeanne. She thanked me, and said Good work, but this is not what we are going to do.

Now, if you are reader of books and can make reasonable predictions, you have probably already surmised that my naive brain was being set up for a let down.

When we met a couple of weeks later, we were joined by three very nice ladies who ranked at about the same level as Jeanne within our district. Your job, they informed us is to develop a curriculum map for other teachers to use within the district. They passed out copies of the first year world languages Scope and Sequence, a document that had already been in place for quite a few years (a scope and sequence defines everything that students should learn in any subject at any grade level) Our task was to negotiate how to put the Scope and Sequence for Spanish, French and German all on a single timeline. No mention was made of collecting data from teachers about what they already do in the classroom. They expressed no interest in learning what each of us had done so far in the year or what neat teaching strategies we utilize to help our kiddos excel. The goal was to take what was already prescribed and add the element of time to the formula.

I surveyed every other teachers' faces to see if I could read whether anyone else was bothered by the lack of concern about collecting the kind of data from teachers as I inferred from our curriculum mapping lesson. Zip. Nada. They yielded me no clues. Over the next few meetings, we did what we were told, and we produced a document that garnered praise from the powers that be.

This year several schools are following the map that I helped make. Sounds like something to be proud of, eh? Realize that it is awkward to follow the same curriculum map when different schools utilize different textbooks and no funds have been set aside to purchase common support materials. Ah, but at least this year there is a concern for collecting data from teachers. It is in the form of more district assessments.

Sigh! I kind of feel dirty knowing that being good before wasn't good enough for government work.