Mission, Vision, Curriculum, Politics

After reading this week's readings for class, I began to try to understand (as mentioned in UBD) the connection between a school's mission, vision, curriculum, and the political demands on school systems. UBD discusses how important it is to keep the end in mind and work backwards when constructing curriculum. If the state standards dictate our "final" results , how can a meaningful and useful mission, vision, and curriculum be established?
So, here are my thought about this subject. A mission explains the school's current goals, for the immediate future, whereas a vision is the "big" picture or what the school will be like in the end. A professor I had last semester stated it beautifully: "Mission is the goal to lose weight, while vision is the image of what you will look like after you lose the weight." Curriculum utilizes these goals to map out what is to be taught and what the learning outcomes are. However, the curriculum is not independent from the mission and vision. They all have to work together to improve student learning.
The complicated portion of this is the demands be the government (i.e. passing the state standardized tests). The only way I could make sense of this was to create a scenario. Suppose we take this scenario. A school has in it's mission and vision something about "developing critical thinkers," for example. The curriculum is then created with learning tasks and objectives to aid the students in becoming critical thinkers. Then the state standards and standardized tests also promote students as critical thinkers. This is where it works! But what happens when the mission, vision, and curriculum are not working toward the same goals? Do those schools fall behind since they do not share the same goals, or are the goals unspoken goals?
After thinking about this topic further, I started to imagine the difficulties faced by administrators when trying to motivate the staff toward passing the state tests. This becomes especially difficult when the administrator does not share the same beliefs as the state. I then looked to a book I am reading that explains this process beautifully. In What Great Principals Do Differently by Todd Whitaker, he says "Effective leaders focus on the behaviors that lead to success, not the beliefs that stand in the way of it. Effective principals don't let standardized tests take over the entire school." He then continues to discuss the schools that exceeded the state's expectations on the tests, and how the principals of those schools felt and what they believed. He explains that these principals realized the importance of test results to others and how it, "brought their school greater autonomy to do what they believed was best for students." These principals also understood the "powerful backdrop" provided by the state standards in aligning and improving curriculum. "The state standards forced educators to shift the focus on the real issue of student learning."
Curriculum must be changed to address the the standards given by the state. However, our mission and vision should also be aligned with the curriculum. All of this is connected and all of it has one main goal: to focus on student learning.

What is Curriculum?

There are many different perspectives to what curriculum entails. I believe that curriculum is made of several different components. Curriculum is the set of guidelines that define what a course of study will be. Curriculum could also include textbooks or materials used in the class as well as the content to be covered. It may also be the set of objectives or what the learning outcomes should be at the conclusion of the course of study.

Now that I have explained my definition of curriculum, who should design it? I believe this is a job for the education professionals. This means that the teachers, supervisors and administrators should be actively involved in the process of curriculum development. I do not believe that a textbook should define the curriculum for the course, but rather a curriculum should define the textbook. I think it would also be a great idea for the parents and students to be a part of the curriculum development. While teachers have great insight as to what may work well in the classroom, students can be very helpful critics. After all, it is the students that are responsible for their own learning.

So, who should control it? Well I know who does control it, but I feel that the same people who create the curriculum should have the control. After reading and discussing about mission statements, it is imperative that the teachers, administrators, and students are actively involved in the mission statement process. Otherwise the mission statement becomes just another piece of paper that schools can check off of their big checklist of things to complete for the year. I feel that the same is true for curriculum. If curriculum is made for courses of study with little or no input from the teachers involved, the curriculum becomes just another piece of paper to check off of the checklist. Curriculum needs to be a document where all stakeholders are involved in creating it so they will be more likely to follow it. I can relate this to a classroom example. If a teacher gives rules to the students and says that this is the way we will do things this year, the students may follow it or they may resist it. However, if the teacher works with the students to develop a list of rules as a class the students will be more likely to follow it and to remember the rules, simply because they are actively involved in the process.

Personal Mission

My mission in school is to model and teach how to become a "life-long" learner. As a teacher, I learn something new each year. I learn new things about myself, my students, and about the profession. I am constantly put into new and diverse situations where I have to reflect on my beliefs and, many times, I have to create different solutions to one problem. My mission is simple, and yet it can be very complex. I love what I teach, and I love teaching. I hope that my passion for my subject is contagious, and I hope that students will want to explore more than just what I present to them in class. Over the years, I have had some reassurance that this mission has been completed, when a few students had brought to class websites, articles, etc. that they found on their own time and shared them.