• Welcome
  • Welcome
• Background
  • Why Teaching?
  • Teaching Philosophy: College Not a Goal but a Fact
  • Professional and Educational Background
• Experiences in Education
  • Introduction
  • Breakthrough Collaborative Sacramento
  • A Better Chance Program
  • Boston Collegiate Charter School
• Academic Work at Hamilton College
  • Introduction
  • Mathematics Major
  • Hispanic Studies Minor
• Educations Studies at Hamilton College
  • Introduction
  • Issues in Education
  • Curriculum and Decision Making
  • Ethnography and the Learning Enviornment
  • Education Practicum
• Resources
  • Inspriring Instruction and Pedagogical Techniques
  • Bibliography

Curriculum and Decision Making

Fall 2010

"The research and scholarship of curricular decision-making is studied to better understand the form and substance of the American public school. Federal and state regulations, standards, and testing processes will be considered when looking at innovative and sometimes controversial curricular plans and models. Case studies, curriculum development activities, and oral reports are used." -Course Description

After learning the history and background of the American public school system I found this class quite appropriate. We delved more into the curriculum development and pedagogy, while focusing on what rules and regulations public school teachers must abide by. We read texts such as Multicultural Education Issues and Perspectives by James A. Banks and Cherry A. McGee Banks, which I will touch on in my resources section, and Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project by Robert P. Moses. This course focused a lot on the multi-cultural aspect of education and how race, ethnicity, and poverty, over time, have shaped our schools' cultures and have had an effect on how students learn and behave.

Today in interviews and discussions, I continuously draw upon the many interesting projects that we were assigned. One assignment our professor asked of us was to write a teaching philosophy. To complete this I analyzed school's missions on their websites, the Common Core Standards, at the time, and mentioned much of my own ideas and philosophies. This helped me shape my teaching philosophy today and see what schools were promoting and focusing on in their schools. As I said in the introduction, I focused on multicultural education and the positive effect that it could have on classrooms around the country. 

Another interesting assignment was to take a recent proposed policy and write a policy brief explaining which side you would take and why. I chose to write about the controversy over the Texas State Board of Education approving controversial alterations to social studies textbooks that will effect students from kindergarten to 12th grade for the next ten years, which happened in March of 2010. I was against the changes because they were eliminating different sides of history, which is very much against the multicultural classroom experience. Also, their changes would be abolishing critical thinking, which therefore demeans high standards for all students.  

Throughout the semester as a class we created a fictitious schools implementing the policies and readings we had learned about from the semester. Once we had figured out that basics of the school and its mission we each took a grade level and subject and created a curriculum and pedagogy proposal. Following New York States Common Core Standards I created a curriculum for 8th grade mathematics. In my pedagogy proposal I focused on the benefits of multi-cultural education and the use of "Say, See, Do" teaching to create engaging lessons.

• Links
  • Teaching Philosophy
  • Policy Brief
  • Curriculum and Pedagogy Proposal