Curriculum Document

         

      The last couple weeks of this course have been challenging for me since I have never seen a curriculum document before.

        Having to create a curriculum document has provided shocking insight to what a career in teaching will be like, and it will not be easy to say the least.  A bunch of terms were thrown at me such as the know, do and be which meant little to me at the time.  Meeting with my group and beginning our curriculum document I began to understand that the know, do, be will be central and important terms in my teaching career as all my lessons will revolve around them.

            When designing lesson plans based on the curriculum teachers look at three major questions of education: what is most important for students to know?  What is most important for students to be able to do?  What kind of person do we want students to be?  The answers to these three questions lead to the know/do/be framework and it is helpful when working with one discipline.  When looking at the curriculum document for the first time it initially all appeared to be jumbled information that made no sense.  Upon deeper analysis the answers to the three big questions for each unit popped out at me and I began to understand what each unit of biology taught and the expectations that followed.
   

The know consists of big ideas and enduring relationships in the KDB umbrella while the be corresponds to attitudes, values and actions.  Finally the do refers to 21st century skills.

The assignment for this class has led to my first blog rant:

    Not being exposed to a curriculum document until fourth year is beyond frustrating.  The concurrent education program is supposed to be preparing me to become a teacher and I feel all I have learned in the education classes is the usual Pavlov's dog and hierarchy of needs.  I feel a curriculum document should have been presented to us way before this class as it would have been beneficial to talk to teachers about curriculum documents during my placements.     Rant over.

Now that I have expressed my frustration we can go back to creating a document.  Looking at the Ontario curriculum documents it is evident that there are a lot of expectations and requirements for teachers to follow.  I feel it is going to be tough to create engaging lesson plans while meeting all the requirements and expectations outlined in the curriculum documents.  Perhaps this is why teachers have resorted to strictly lecturing as opposed to trying to come up with interesting lessons- there is not enough time in a semester to engage students with every lesson while also covering all of the material.  

Perhaps my next blog will incorporate ways to cover everything in the document while making learning engaging and fun!