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Teachers facing daunting task with new curriculum > Back
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By Brandon Larrabee - Morris News Service
ATLANTA - When it came to teaching her fourth-grade
students about Native Americans several years ago, Lissa Pijanowski
was full of ideas for activities she could use in her lessons.
That was the way Pijanowski, now director of
school improvement at the Georgia Department of Edu-cation, read
the state requirement that she teach her students about Native
Amer-icans. But another teacher, she admitted, might have taught
the same standard very differently.
That's not likely to happen anymore, as the state
rolls out its new curriculum, the Georgia Performance Stan-dards.
But even before the first portion of the GPS takes hold in the
classroom, the department faces the daunting task of training
tens of thousands of teachers across the state's 181 school systems
how to make sure their students learn the new benchmarks. Educators
say teacher training is perhaps the most critical element when
it comes to implementing the new standards.
To illustrate the point during a presentation
to the state Board of Education, Pijan-owski and her colleagues
gave each board member a toy car and modeled their slides after
the popular Web site Mapquest.
''Not having quality professional learning is
like building a state of the art car and leaving it at the factory
and not rolling it out,'' said Dr. Eloise Barron, the department's
curriculum director.
Large change
Part of the reason for the emphasis on teacher
training is the nature of the change facing Georgia's education
system. The old Quality Core Curriculum was criticized for being
''a mile wide and an inch deep,'' and while the QCC listed what
educators say were vague objectives for students, it left a lot
of room for individual teachers to decide how to translate those
benchmarks to the classroom.
The roll-out of the new curriculum - accompanied
by sample classroom work and a Web site where teachers can go
to see sample lesson plans - is meant to make the difference between
what students learn in different classrooms smaller.
''I feel it will solve the problem of having
a mixed presentation of lessons throughout the state due to different
interpretations of the curriculum by teachers,'' said Pat Biggerstaff,
a former elementary school teacher who represents the Ninth Congressional
District on the state Board of Education.
But that will require new thinking by Georgia
teachers and those who train them. The proposed standards, which
the board will vote on next month, include some radical departures
in both subject matter and the method for teaching students.
Teachers might have to give up some of the material
they considered critical to their subject.
High school math teachers face an entirely new
structure for their courses, which will no longer be algebra,
geometry and so on but will instead carry titles like Math I,
Math II, Math III and Math IV. Students will be expected to read
25 books or a million words each year.
''I know (there are) going to be a lot of challenges
for teachers,'' said Chase Puckett, a Screven Middle School teacher
who is the department's Teacher of the Year.
The new middle school math standards - which
include a requirement that all students take Algebra I by the
end of eighth grade - are of particular concern to educators.
Some middle school teachers might not be prepared
to teach higher-level courses like algebra, said Deborah White,
executive director of the Georgia Association of Curriculum and
Instructional Supervisors.
The state's 2,000 principals will also require
training in order to support teachers and make sure lessons reflect
the new curriculum.
Two-year plan
Superintendent Kathy Cox has publicly pledged
that educators will know the GPS well enough to teach it when
the time comes.
''Georgia teachers have my word that we are not
going to leave you stranded, sitting there struggling with new
curriculum standards,'' she said.
The department has a series of two-year plans
for making sure teachers are ready to use the new standards in
the classroom before students are tested on the GPS.
Each year, the department will begin a new two-year
cycle of teacher instruction. For example, this year training
will begin in English-language arts, sixth-grade math, sixth-
and seventh-grade science and high school science courses.
Department officials will select dozens of state
trainers, who will in turn teach teams from each of the state's
school systems how to train teachers. Those teams will take the
lessons back to the local level. Under a slightly different system,
principals will receive training particular to the level of school
they oversee.
But the effort won't just include the one-shot
training for current teachers. Education colleges will have to
re-evaluate their curriculum, something Dan Papp, senior vice
chancellor for the University System of Georgia, said was already
under way.
Phasing in
2004-05
English-Language Arts - All grades
Mathematics - 6th grade
Science - 6th and 7th grade, high school
2005-06
Mathematics - K-2nd grade, 7th grade
Science - 3rd-5th grade
Social Studies - All grades
2006-07
Mathematics - 3rd-5th grade, 8th grade
Science - K-2nd grade, 8th grade
2007-08
Mathematics - High school
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