The first semester is under way, and already classes, papers, tests, and projects consume students and teachers alike. In my classroom and lab, Chemistry students are moving ever further into the world of balanced equations, moles, gas laws, and atomic structure. As I look across the hall, students in the classrooms of other Chemistry teachers are involved in a similar pursuit. Each section of Chemistry moves at a similar pace, covers the same material, and emphasizes the same skill set.
However, this was not always the case. When I arrived at Concord Academy in the fall of 2001, there was little cohesion in the Chemistry curriculum due to the personalities, independence, and strengths of the individual teachers teaching the course. My charge was to lead the group to create a more consistent experience for our mostly sophomore Chemistry students.
Like many independent schools, Concord Academy gives its teachers significant freedom to create the best possible course in pursuit of the School's mission. Such autonomy results in creativity and teacher ownership. However, the significant downside of such independence is that student experiences will vary greatly between teachers. In a course that greater than 90% of students take prior to graduation, consistency of experience was necessary for students, and to achieve that consistency greater collegiality would be required of the adults.
Such curricular change was not without precedent in the School or even in the Science Department. Around the same time that I arrived, and guided by a mission statement that promotes engaging students "in a community animated by a love of learning", the Science Department dropped the Advanced Placement (AP) curriculum during the 2001 - 2002 school year. While losing the AP designation did not directly affect the introductory Chemistry course, the possibility of change was in the air. M m y presence as a new member of the Chemistry sub-department and the Department's recent move away from the Advanced Placement curriculum introduced the possibility for change. The teachers involved in the Chemistry curriculum began to recognize the importance of producing a more consistent experience for the students and felt that the Chemistry curriculum needed to reflect more accurately current best practices and departmental philosophy. Unfortunately, there was little agreement on how or when the changes necessary to achieve that goal should occur, resulting in an impasse.
For the next two school years, the group unsuccessfully tried to cobble together curricular changes. Realizing how difficult it was to make significant progress during the course of the year, the Chemistry teachers agreed to gather for a sustained effort during the summer to rethink the Chemistry curriculum and confront core curricular questions. With the blessing of and funding from the Dean of Faculty, our group met during the first three weeks of summer break to hash out ideas, clear away the brambles, and create a new course.
This summer work was a significant event for us, and brought us miles from where we had been a few years before. Although our approach then was not as crystalline as it now appears on paper, it proved successful and may serve as model for others looking to initiate significant curricular change.
Here are the lessons we learned from this experience:
- Each member of the group must be poised for change.
The first step in our curriculum innovation was arguably the most difficult. So difficult, in fact, that it was a multi-year process to get each teacher "to the table" and ready to engage in tough conversations regarding change. As mentioned, when I first came to the School, the Chemistry curriculum was solid, yet each student taking the course had a significantly different experience. Some teachers emphasized a big picture/big question approach while others favored a quantitative, systematic, and data driven approach. The highly independent and disjointed nature of the individual approaches needed to be addressed. Because teaching is so personal, however, it is not easy to readily accept the ideas of others and change the way things are done.
Much work was done to validate each teacher's approach and individual strengths while working to create a team culture within the Chemistry group. The group met weekly to check in. These meetings always had an agenda that was distributed beforehand, and topics included the pace of the course, upcoming experiments, successes, and failures. At this point, however, there was still little cohesion among the teachers. The frequent contact in the first years working together was serving a dual purpose: teachers built personal relationships (necessary for difficult discussions) and each teacher learned the value of discussing the events occurring in his or her classroom.
Conversations that "went too far" stalled out at this early date. Slowly, and with each passing year, members of the group looked outside of their individual classrooms and began to share more lessons, experiments, and ideas. Each teacher in the Chemistry group began to appreciate each other's differences and learn from the talents and strengths of the others. Two key realizations occurred that brought everyone to the table, ready to engage in a conversation about curricular change:
- Each teacher could never (and should never) teach exactly the same course.
- The collective thinking of the group would yield a class that was better for our students.
The time was right to make necessary changes.
- Everything must be up for discussion.
The Chemistry group began the summer work by putting everything on the table for discussion. Each individual's favorite experiments, topics, and units were fair game, as were broader issues germane to the curriculum, such as gender in the classroom, grading policies and standards, and the role of external metrics like the SAT II subject test.
As mentioned, so much of teaching reflects personal style and strengths - a teacher's primary mode of delivery, assignments, student expectations, activities, grading, and content emphasis. As one might expect, the conversations that focused on individual preference were the most difficult conversations to begin and to pursue. Though each teacher had specific strengths and interests, as well as likes and dislikes regarding curriculum, each person entered into the summer work open to and supportive of change. The conversations were not easy but the group achieved full buy-in from each teacher, with everyone open to the creation of the best possible course for our students, even at the expense of individual teacher preferences. Having cleared two major hurdles (everyone desiring change and all topics on the table), we began to identify and understand our curricular values. I am confident that these difficult conversations could not have occurred if not for the strong relationships and trust forged over the previous years.
- Explore the general curricular values of the group.
We began this work with a series of broad questions centered on our curricular values. For example, what value can Chemistry contribute to the academic enrichment of our students and do we value content and knowledge or skill and application? The conversations that flowed from these questions were some of the most interesting of the entire summer. These questions and the ensuing conversations helped each teacher clarify his or her thoughts. As a group, we explored our collective educational philosophy. One conclusion of these conversations was that we would adopt a "laboratory first" approach for most topics. This change stemmed from our shared belief in active learning environments. Additionally, we agreed on the need to create an equivalent experience for students regardless of teacher, and to bridge the gap between biology and physics by making connections to various branches of science. It was only after we hashed out the intricacies of our values that were we able to address specific content questions. The values illuminated by these conversations became a mini-mission of the group; decisions moving forward had to relate back to the values of the group.
- Express the general curricular values of the group in the new curriculum.
The values discussion was tremendously helpful as the group moved toward the more traditional work of determining content, activities, feedback, and evaluation techniques. With the framework in place, it was possible to see the places where previous activities and lessons fit, as well as the places where innovation and fine-tuning were required. We found that with the move to an inquiry-based and lab-first approach to new material, more work was required in pre-lab exercises to provide context for students. Additionally, as a group we developed specific rubrics for students to clarify grading, content knowledge, and skill expectations. The rubrics were detailed enough to create greater consistency from teacher to teacher but not so binding as to remove each teacher's judgment. The students preferred the rubrics because expectations were clearly stated.
An additional manifestation of our values conversation came with the decision to do more with less; we pared back content from previous years in order to probe more deeply those topics of value to our students. In this way, the introductory Chemistry curriculum was undergoing its own "data dump," similar to the move away from the AP curriculum in upper-level science courses The conscious decision to remove material, rather than add, gave over more time for scientific discovery to our students. New experiments were created and old favorites rewritten to promote inquiry-based learning practices. The values we held as teachers and as a Department drove our decisions, rather than the perceived need to cover, cover, cover.
- Implement the new curriculum.
A small portion of the redesign process included the adaptation of a new textbook. Our experience shows that the texts written for high school students are often insufficient for the ability level of our students, while content-heavy texts are geared toward college students; a book that was pitched at the appropriate level for the full range of our students was imperative. Another requirement for a new book was that it needed to include a substantial amount of problems of varying difficulty. Often these problems are used to subsidize teacher-generated problems and are incorporated into homework or used to help students prepare for tests and quizzes.
One of the most important aspects of implementing the curriculum was on-going communication. The Chemistry group continued to meet regularly during the course of the next school year to share information on the progression of the new curriculum. The best of intentions and plans in June may have little bearing on the classroom in February. As such, the lead teacher helped coordinate the pace of the classes and was in frequent communication with the other teachers. Unit syllabi, problem sets, laboratory rubrics, and sample test questions were shared regularly. Additionally, the group carried out a number of cross-grading exercises to ensure grading consistency between various teachers. The activities and follow-ups that occurred during the course of the year helped us evaluate the changes engineered during the summer. With a new teacher entering in to the Chemistry sub-department next this year, our group is excited to re-evaluate the curriculum once again this summer; the entire process will begin again.
Curricular change is not easy and it is not fast. But it is critical to the health of a program, the students the program serves, and the teachers involved. The changes the Chemistry group at Concord Academy made in the curriculum were by no means radical in the field of chemical education. However, the new curriculum is the result of significant interpersonal work on the part of the Chemistry group. This work, marked by the steps noted above, helped this group to unite behind change, identify values, implement new curriculum, and re-evaluate the final product. Of course, continued evaluation and tinkering occurs to this day. The significant difference is that it occurs from a point of group strength and unity.