Well Bill you've done it again. The slide you offered on your blog brings up a pet peeve of mine....bloated curriculum. It isn't a new problem...something we've had in all the 15+ years that I've been teaching. I guess we used to just ignore the stuff we, as teachers, didn't think was important and so it wasn't such a big deal.
The rise of PLCs, common assessment and curriculum mapping has made this a more obvious problem now. Now we know we aren't teaching everything and it is documented. I guess it's sort of like uncovering the pink elephant.
here's the thing..in order to survive this new spotlight I think you have to be smarter. In my science curriculum, for example, there's no way to cover everything with any kind of integrity. I thought and thought about my curriculum until it finally dawned on me that there were overarching themes and concepts that tie it all together. Mega skills and mega themes that I could frame all the tedious factoids that I'm required to teach. For me this was realizing that density and convection currents are the big ideas of my curriculum.
It's how I fight back. I run my room based on inquiry principles and pound away at density and convections currents. It helps me to make this huge body of knowledge accessible to my 6th graders...pretty quickly they learn that it must have something to do with one of those concepts and they use that to reason it out.
I'm still driven crazy by trying to cover it all. It makes me lie away at night. Daily I have to tell myself that I am doing what's best for my kids by framing this way. It's sad isn't it?
