Daniel Chominski

May 19th, 2016

EDU 520
Part II: Reflection The purpose of this reflection is to ponder your prior knowledge and experience with
curriculum study. Consider your personal and professional exposure to curriculum, as a student, parent, and / or as
an educator. Identify key elements in curriculum that have influenced your view of curriculum design, delivery,
outcomes, and effectiveness. Specify both positive and negative aspects of the curriculum you have experienced.
Write a clear and concise reaction paper of no more than 3 pages that demonstrates depth of thought. A
recommendation is to utilize the linked websites within the power point from the first night of class.

My experiences with curriculum have varied over the years. I have had the opportunity
to assist in writing our College and Career Curriculum for Chichester High School. This
curriculum has set benchmarks and goals for our students to reach throughout the year. My
experiences with curriculum have also been through my interactions with principals, lead
teachers, teachers and students. Through the process of consultation, Ive had the chance to sit
down with these stakeholders and analyze the positives and negatives of their classroom
interactions that have been guided by the implemented curricula and consequences of those
curricula.
In my experiences through writing our College and Career Curriculum at Chichester, Ive
found that the creating process is very challenging. The most difficult aspect of the process was
determining the scope and sequence of what we wanted each grade level to see and learn about
themselves and college. To accomplish that, we felt the only way to get it done was by using an
integrated curriculum as many goals needed to be covered throughout many grades over a very
short period of time. Overall, this experience with curriculum has been very positive. We have
managed to stay on task and meet many of our goals. To measure our success, weve seen higher
application numbers and higher acceptance numbers to college in general. While this isnt a
direct result of the curriculum, the curriculum certainly has had an impact.

My experience with our College and Career curriculum was enlightening. We put a great
amount of work into a curriculum that covered four grades, yet only had a limited amount of
benchmarks. That alone gave me insight to the work that is put into school, district and state
based curricula. While the state and national based curricula has been the basis of some of my
negative interactions with the subject, I do not envy the job of writing Common curriculum for
a nation of different individuals. In fact, the job itself is impossible and is a cause for strife for
many educators. While Common Core is relatively new, it was not the first time Common
curriculum was thought to be a panacea for all students, everywhere.
In 1993, the hot new curriculum was the Core Knowledge Curriculum, which in my
opinion, sounds a lot like Common Core. The Core Knowledge curriculum had great success in
many schools. One school in New York called the Mohegan School stated that they
tremendously increased the students ability to question (Hirsch, 1993). This new and
promising curriculum was implemented with the thought that they would cover 50 percent of
what schools would teach by promoting higher order thinking and the implementation of
scaffolding on top of learned knowledge.
Core Knowledge stated that to promote this it would have teachers interacting with its
students over 80 percent of the time in the classroom (Hirsch, 1993). Primarily, the curriculum
wanted to create authentic connections for the students so that they could learn. In the Mohegan
School, the teachers also commented that critical thinking skills also increased significantly with
the implementation of the curriculum (Hirsch, 1993). In this way, this was very positive,
however, the Core Knowledge curriculum did not implement technology in the classroom which
is a key aspect of the Common Core and the HEAT walkthroughs that our school implements.

At Chichester, in my experience, they have molded the way teachers teach around this
way of thinking. They have done this through the eyes of the Common Core curriculum and
what it has brought to our state and country. Our school has transitioned to the Common Core
throughout the last three years. In my experience, our teachers have expressed frustration,
especially in Math. Our Math teachers have always expressed frustration with having to teach a
certain way when it comes to subjects that they had been teaching for years and years. As a
counselor, it is always my job to help them get through frustrations and help them find solutions
to issues or just hear them out.
The Common Core also has spurred our district to incorporate HEAT walkthroughs.
HEAT walkthroughs were required to make sure that our teachers were incorporating higher
order thinking, engaged learning, creating authentic connections and technology. This
implementation is very similar to the Core Knowledge philosophy of years past. While I believe,
that this is legitimate and help students learn, I believe that the implementation is flawed.
In my opinion, I feel that the Heat walkthroughs are very valuable as they provide
teachers with consistent, positive feedback that works. However, the fact that they have to
implement a strict, Common Core curriculum and work towards completing benchmarks for the
Keystone, teachers have a lot of difficulty in using their creativity in the classroom. This
potentially limits how much higher order discussions can organically be used in the classroom
and limits the creativity of teachers in the way of creating authentic connections. In this way, my
experiences have been negative with curriculum. The repercussions of having to teach to an
exam and always having that in the forefront have absolutely caused issues, even with the
potentially valuable HEAT mindset attempting to guide instruction. While the Common Core
will probably come and go just as Core Knowledge did, it is important for teachers to be able to

creatively use their skills and help our students develop their ability to think about things
critically and analytically.

References

Hirsch, E. D. (may 1993). The Core Knowledge Curriculum- What's Behind Its Success?
Educational Leadership, 50(8), 23-30. Retrieved May 19, 2016, from
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/may93/vol50/num08/toc.aspx