Question – The teachers at my school understand the new requirement and the necessity of having daily objectives posted on our boards so that our students stay focused on their learning. My question for the superintendent is this: Since every elementary teacher in the district is supposed to follow the district curriculum mapping with both Imagine It and Go Math!, and we are supposed to have a content and language objectives posted for both of these areas with grade-level appropriate vocabulary every day, why can’t we have grade-specific teams of educators meet and write/ figure out the objectives for each lesson and then post them on the intranet so that there is consistency in the district and so that the other 3,000 of us can just come each morning and pull them off the web and post them each day? This would prevent inconsistency with the objectives and as well as prevent the majority of us from having to reinvent the wheel each morning, adding 5 or 10 minutes to the beginning of each day that we already don’t have, and spending up to an hour of our valuable planning time each Friday figuring them out and writing them down in our plan books, just so that we can hand copy them onto our limited board space in our classroom at the beginning of each day. (Bold printed 72 font writing on an 11 x 17 piece of paper would be better, don’t you think?)
If this is something that could be considered, I would volunteer to be on this team of educators, and I’m sure many others would volunteer, too, providing we were offered lane change credit for doing it. ;0)
Response – The suggestion that we spare teachers the additional responsibility of creating their individual content objectives and provide them at the district level for all elementary teachers to use is a good one. In fact, they already exist on the district provided curriculum maps in language arts and mathematics; they are noted as “I Can. . . ” statements. Also available are generic language objectives to be adapted to fit the lesson and language needs of the students. Hope this helps!