A Piece About Our Curriculum...
What's New and What's to Come
Brian Archibald
Background...
Though more and more teachers are sharing lesson plans and resources online, the curriculum publishing industry is still very much alive and prosperous -for now. Large school districts often have little choice but to rely on "all-encompassing" programs published by giants who seem to be spending as much time purchasing one another as they do publishing.
There are a lot of good programs out there. Publishers work hand-in-hand with professional organizations to ensure that their offerings align with national standards and promote best practice. One example is our current Everyday Math program which is at least ninety-four percent in-line with the standards set by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM). It goes without saying that such adherence makes good business sense. Each series competes in a multibillion dollar market, and districts will stay with a program for many years before exploring alternatives. Publishers understand that successful marketing demands an intimate understanding of their target demographic.
Your child is not a member of this demographic.
In order to even be considered for a slice of this billion-dollar pie, a program must not only be aligned with national standards, but it must be calibrated to hit the center mass of a classroom of twenty-three to thirty-two students with ability levels ranging from the fifteenth to ninety-ninth percentile. Walden's classrooms, with a maximum of sixteen students, all at or above the fiftieth percentile, represent such a miniscule segment of the market that it's often difficult for me to have my calls returned by sales reps. I'm actually okay with this. I figure you must be doing something right if salespeople have no interest in talking to you.
Resource, Not Curriculum...
Next to not accepting state and federal money, our in-house crafting of our own curriculum probably most defines us as an independent school. It's because we don't use tax money that we can teach our own curriculum. As such, it's imperative that any program we use at Walden serves as a resource to compliment our curriculum rather than define it. One such example is our K-2 Houghton Mifflin Reading series. It's a comprehensive program which is in full alignment with the standards set by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). The series covers reading, vocabulary and writing. It even comes with a pre-formatted curriculum rubric with a "your school name here" space where the title should be. It would be very easy to slap our name on it and call it our curriculum, but doing so would shortchange our students and undermine the creativity of our teachers.
Instead, our K-2 teachers rip into the program, pulling out the best pieces which support and serve our expectations for early language arts. We use their three-lined handwriting pages but still teach the "Handwriting Without Tears" method for making the letters. Teachers like many of the reading exercises, which stress phonemic awareness and fluency, but also rely on their own lessons to challenge phonemic substitution and deletion. The leveled reader books that come with the program are too limited in scope and challenge for a single grade, yet when we pool the books as a K-2 resource, it provides a great deal of flexibility for differentiation. While many schools adopt the program K-8, our third and fourth grade teachers felt that the series falls short on reading comprehension because it presupposes that the targeted third grader still struggles with phonemic awareness. This is why we begin with a new series in third grade. Walden teachers handpick resources to best serve our students in every discipline and grade. Our supplementing with computation practice in our Everyday Math program is another example.
With the freedom to pick and choose comes the responsibility of frequent assessment and communication in order to remain organized and accountable. Aside from our grade-level teachers partnering and sharing ideas, our faculty meets throughout the year in K-12 departments to assure that our curriculum and expectations are consistent from grade to grade. One recent Language Arts meeting resulted in a new K-8 resource for teaching and reinforcing grammar skills.
DGP Publishing Doesn't Even Have A Sales Rep...
But if they did, I think they would probably return my calls. During a visit to the NCTE conference last fall, middle school teachers Linda Kunz and Kim Sorise attended a workshop featuring a grammar series from DGP Publishing. Unless it's an uncanny coincidence, the DGP stands for their series, Daily Grammar Practice. Both Mrs. Kunz and Ms. Sorise were intrigued by the series and brought it back to our Language Arts meeting where the rest of us were equally impressed. This series is a prime example of the new movement of "micropublishers."
DGP Publishing is the brainchild of two teachers whose research and development efforts consist of teaching grammar. They felt that their daily, five-minute lessons were more effective than the "Big Box" programs, so they decided to utilize the new self-publishing movement to market their work. We think they made the right choice.
Since our return in January, first through eighth graders have been working with this series. On Mondays, students are introduced to a sentence which they work with for five minutes each day throughout the week. Each daily lesson builds on the previous day's content, and the process begins anew the following week. While sentence complexity increases just a little each week, concepts and terminology covered on Tuesday, Wednesday, etc. is constant throughout the program and grade level. And best of all, it's perfect for challenging higher-level learners in a small class setting. Due to its simplicity, limited audience and low price, such a "balloon" would never "float" at the corporate level.
The Biggest of The Big Picture...
As a school that hangs its hat on staying on the cutting edge of best practice and current research, we are constantly looking ahead. And while our new grammar series is simply another resource for our teachers, it represents something much, much larger.
So let's start with the bottom line. Under the current model, it costs just our Lower School at least five thousand dollars each time we change publishers or a publisher updates materials -which they do at least every three years. This does not even include the cost of workbooks (disposables), which is incorporated into bookstore fees. While a large district may not think twice about such an expense, this is a very tough pill to swallow for a small independent school, which only uses the bits that are appropriate for a couple hundred high-end learners.
Enter the new-model: a web-enabled, micropublishing movement which allows us little guys the opportunity to cater to a select audience rather than the general populace of millions. Suddenly, we can now publish five documents for the same cost as five thousand. With DGP, two teachers became their own publishing house with zero overhead. Total cost to Walden for the entire first through eighth grade program was under five hundred dollars. Such a low cost to quality ratio was unheard of a couple of years ago.
While I'm pleased our children are benefiting from a more challenging and focused grammar series, I am even more excited about where all this is heading. We are beginning to witness an explosion in the number and quality of resources available to our teachers for targeting the individual learning styles and levels of the independent school classroom. Yet while I have no doubt that the micropublishing movement will have a huge impact on the way small classrooms are run in the near future, essentially what we are seeing is technology finally catching up to what Walden's teachers have been doing for over thirty-five years: expediting a curriculum which places the individual before the masses.
Walden-Press Publishing could be just on the horizon.
