What's the Big Issue? Creating Standards-Based Curriculum: What Is Necessary Is a Re-Wiring of That Part of Your Brain That Controls Curriculum Development
Glenn R. Hider · 2005
A student in my methods class recently presented an engaging lesson to his classmates. He asked about a technology used in sporting events using video camera images. The system, made by Ques Tec, uses a series of cameras, computers, and sophisticated tracking technologies to create computer-generated virtual replays in a number of venues including tennis, golf, and baseball. The students quickly recognized applications: tennis balls barely hitting the white line, slow motion analysis of golf swings, and pitches entering the strike zone of batters. The discussion continued with the baseball application: How could the technology actually help the game? Suggestions included: batters scouting the pitchers for their tendencies; pitchers scouting batters for their tendencies; pitchers scouting umpires for their tendencies in calling strikes; and the league using the results to help umpires improve. Ultimately, the discussion settled on whether or not umpires should be replaced outright by the new technology. A lively debate presented issues from several points of view. I knew right away this would be a great topic for a recently finished curriculum entitled Technological Issues. Technological Issues is one of a series of standards-based curricula being developed through the Center for the Advancement of Teaching Technology and Science (CATI-S). The curriculum, which should be available to CATIS Consortium members this fall, has been developed by this author over the past year and a half. Surprisingly, it seems that many issues, such as the one that surfaced in my class, appear to be an excellent fit within this curriculum. Given a topic as broad and far-reaching as technological issues, how then do you begin to develop a curriculum that is standards-based, relevant but not dating itself, and that can please the many consortium constituents? This indeed was a challenge, and one that I would like to share with the readers. The simplest approach is to look at this curriculum development as a system: inputs (guiding principles), processes (how to develop standards-based curriculum), output (the curriculum), and feedback (what the reviewers reacted to). Knowing there are readers who will examine this from different perspectives, Figure 1 shows the system model and what each section refers to (feel free to skip to the section that most affects you). [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Inputs Obviously, for standards-based curriculum, we need to start with the standards. This is easy to say, but a bit more difficult to put into practice. Fortunately, we have national standards that have been developed through ITEA with the collaboration of other nationally recognized organizations (NSF, NASA, AAAS, NAE). Standards for Technological Literacy (ITEA, 2000/2002) provides the starting point. But which standards and benchmarks should be included, and how many should the curriculum include? The first step in the process was to identify organizing principles. In other words, what are the major ideas that a technologically literate person should be able to articulate? A discussion of this process was presented by Barry Burke in the May/June 2005 issue of The Technology Teacher (Burke, 2005), and has been identified by ITEA as the Engineering by Design[TM] model. This process resulted in the identification of course content organizers. The next step involved the use of experts to identify which standards/benchmarks represented each of the organizing principles. The final result is a series of courses, which, taken as a whole in the high school sequence, will ensure that all standards are covered. Not all standards are covered in any one course, and some standards may be in more than one course, but all standards are addressed within the collection of courses. The next detail was to identify specific benchmarks for each course curriculum, and the intensity of their use. Should they be covered in detail and drive the lesson, covered with some detail, or merely be supportive? …