Turning Points 2000: Chapter 3

Chapter 3:

This chapter discussed how to make middle school curriculum reach out to every student. The authors suggest that teachers who want to create a curriculum that will make students succeed should focus on tying them to the standards. They call this concept the backward design, because teachers would first pick a standard they want to meet and go from there. Most of the rest of the chapter discussed how to chose standards and implement them; some of their suggestions were making sure that when choosing standards they are useful and clear, brief, and if it’s possible for the students to cover all the standards the teachers want. After they discussed the curriculum, the authors discussed the different assessment methods that teachers can use to connect with the standards. When teachers are assessing they should make sure that they assess students both formally and informally in multiple ways. The authors suggested that teachers focus on authentic assessment because it makes the assessment real and interesting for the students. By using authentic assessment, teachers are given students the chance to demonstrate their knowledge in a real way.

I thought this chapter was interesting because a lot of what was discussed was new information and I would like to see it implemented before I pass judgment. The authors really brought up a lot of good points when they discussed how to pick standards for instruction. For example, they suggest that a standard should be feasible and developmental; this is something that we constantly see schools fail at. Students will get this huge textbook on the first day of school and they never actually make it through the entire thing. I can’t tell you how many different years I covered the same topics just in different ways. Schools always seem to end right around World War I or II. I liked many of the suggestions because I felt that if they had been implemented when I was in school I probably would have paid more attention to certain subjects.