PME 811: Blog Entry 4 - Innovation that doesn't work

Innovation that doesn't work - my experiences with curriculum reform

It's a quote I'm used to hearing now: "Nothing's certain except taxes, bad weather, and curriculum reform." I'm pretty sure it's a regional line that gained traction in the school board where my mother worked for 30 years, but the sentiment is shared in the various districts where I have worked.

Rant alert - this ineffective and unnecessary change is an abuse of innovation and a sore point for me. The quote speaks to the frustration of teachers who are shuffled to a different grade every year, requiring a whole new set of resources and hundreds of hours spent on everything from rubrics to report card comments, only to discover (in the one year they finally get a grade level for the second time) that the curriculum has changed. There was a period in my province where the curriculum was 'tweaked' nearly every other year and my mother's school was usually the pilot for each change. UGH.

I've seen so many curriculum reforms that failed, but the most obvious one has to have been one of the first moves toward student-inquiry-led learning in Ontario when I was a student. My school was the pilot for the province and we, in a grade 6 classroom, used a new math textbook that had been commissioned for the project. The book contained only word problems - that's it. No explanations, no basic skill practice, no examples, and - crucially - no answers that we could check our work against. The bonus, of course, was that the answers in the teachers' books were the a single number result with no explanation or work shown and the teachers often couldn't figure out how they had gotten those answers! Teachers were minimally trained (and that training was more about what NOT to do than how TO do this) and it was a provincial testing year. About halfway through the year, the three grade 6 class teachers made the executive decision to throw out the new textbook and teach as they always had so that we would pass the provincial exam. The decision was made after too many students ended up in tears of frustration, insisting that they were 'too stupid' to understand math. I got a unique perspective on this one as my mother was one of the teachers and I was one of the students - I was frustrated and lost, and I heard from my mother that she was untrained and frustrated as well. The pilot project was deemed a failure and the book contract was cancelled. The entire province went to a different textbook and inquiry-led math was scrapped until it was reintroduced as a small component of the larger math program years later.

As a teacher, though, the worst I ever saw was a music curriculum reform. When I was a student in teacher's college my class was selected to be one of the groups that would proof read the soon-to-be released high school instrumental music program. The competencies we were given to proof included things like 'students in grade 2 will be able to correctly identify and perform clarinet fingerings for the following notes..." That sounds fine, except there is no way any child in grade 2 could possibly reach the keys necessary. The rest of the document was similarly outrageous and had to be completely rewritten in time for release. This reform didn't hit the field, but to me it was the greatest failure of all because it so blatantly ignored the reality of the classroom. It was disheartening and even insulting to me that people with such limited classroom experience were dictating what my students would have to prove. The point, I suppose, is that innovation in things like curriculum and pedagogy can (and does) happen for no better reason than a desire for change.

How about you? What are your experiences with curriculum reform and innovation?