"Bringing Everyone Together"

This article is called "All Aboard!" and it is by David and Margaret Carpenter from December/January 2008-2009. The overall message of this article is about how a new curriculum-development review process brought teachers, administrators, and learning specialists to the table and resulted in some innovative uses of technology.

According to the article "at Hong Kong International School (HKIS), technology instruction gained traction when it was addressed alongside several curriculum initiatives." The article explains how it worked when "teachers, learning specialists, and administrators comprised the Collaboration Team based on the idea that everyone should participate and “own” the curriculum." This set-up allowed teachers to be in charge of the process. The article also talked about the benefit of having so many different people apart of the process. It stated that "having so many perspectives helped eliminate redundancies as well as build upon students’ skills sequentially." Another important thing to note about these meetings was that "by giving teachers classroom coverage for the half- and full-day meetings, the school principal validated the process while avoiding the usual rushed through after-school meetings." Also, "a second driver for ICL integration involved the use of a versatile online curriculum-mapping tool that contained a unit-planning template. That template is structured to prompt users to add specific instructional strategies and assessments enhanced by technology use." Most importantly, "in their annual review of the process, collaboration teams base their discussions on the success of past assessments (Did students learn what we intended for them to learn?) and comment on how the essential questions, instructional strategies, and assessments often needed further refinement and crafting." On example from the article is of a 4th grade class and how "for their nutrition unit, fourth graders shared and compared recordings of their eating habits by adding daily to a class wiki in their Moodle course sites. The development of library lessons on asking good research questions, note taking, using subscription databases, and citing sources tied directly to the fourth grade’s essential questions." The idea of the curriculum-development review process is very interesting as many of us will one day be in that situation and it is vital to understand how to work with different people and how to develop a curriculum that matters and that is necessary for your students.

After reading about the different examples from the article, I can see how this could work in my future classroom and how I can adapt my lessons. One idea from the article was to use the program Audacity to create podcasts for the student's assessments. For example, I could have the students record reflections from their writing conferences. I would prompt my students to record their thoughts about how they are improving their use of the writing process, what they are working on as writers and the next steps they plan to take. This would provide me with instant feedback as I could listen to the sound files from the writing conferences. Through this article, I am able to see the benefits of working with a staff of people to create a stronger curriculum as well as learn new ways to adapt my lessons for my future class.