Why This Year is Better

Last year at this time, I was the teacher who was being blamed for lowering the GPA of an entire grade level.  Today, I got the grade reports for all of my students and I am happy to see that I can not be accused of that same thing. 

Why is there a difference this year?  Well, last year I took a long hard look at the English curriculum that was being required of the general grade 12 classes.  What I saw was a lot of classical literature that really had no relation to the skills that universities were looking for in their bilingual student admissions candidates. 

I saw that the students for Turkish admissions did not need to have any real exposure to what we would consider the classical western cannon.  As most of our students here end up staying in Turkey, I started looking at what skills were needed. 

I saw that students needed to write well, have critical problem solving skills, and have a grasp of basic speaking skills. 

"Ciara," I said to myself, "you need to make some changes in how you reach these targets."

So I made a proposal about a new way to get students the writing, speaking, and problem solving skills the university system requires.

So far, the web based and personal interest based class that I have created is working well, and student grades reflect a greater level of class participation and interest in the course materials.

One of the reasons why, I believe, the students last year had a hard time connecting to the class is that they saw no clear relationship between the course work (reading poetry, "The Great Gatsby", and "Pride and Prejudice" and doing literary analysis) and the skills the universities wanted.

This year, when I say things like, "You need to learn how to blog so that you don't make a fool of yourself," or "You need to learn how to send an email that won't make your university professor laugh at you," the students see how these types of assignments will benefit them immediately.

Because of this clearly established relationship between class work and university skills, my students are, for the most part, really putting in some work for me. 

The thing that made this all possible is a curriculum adoption system in this school that works like this:

"Hey, boss, I'm thinking about making these changes for these reasons."
"That sounds good.  Let me think about it."

A week passes.

"Hey, Ciara, go ahead and make those changes for next year."

And that was basically it.

This was amazing because Turkey tends to be weighed down with layers of bureaucracy that makes getting the simplest things, like new whiteboard markers, take over a month.


Comments

  1. That's awesome. I wish that I could make changes in the curriculum I teach so that it would reflect what I think the students actually need to know. Also, kudos on the "email that won't make your professor laugh at you" concept - most of my students would benefit from that and English is their first language.

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