Friday, December 5, 2014

I killed the Technology Scope and Sequence.

When I first took on the role of IT coordinator at my school we had a beautiful, well developed, thorough, and complete scope and sequence for technology skills. It was laid out in an amazing document, with cross-indexes, tabs, and even colour. It was also useless.

It described exactly what skills were to be introduced, reinforced, and mastered in each grade level. It covered dozens of topics and hundreds of skills. It was the most comprehensive document of its kind I had ever seen. But teachers couldn't use it. It had so many skills they couldn't possibly cover them all, even assuming the teacher knew how to do it in the first place. What's more the document would be out of date within a year and would require constant updating.

So one of my first jobs was to make this document more relevant.

So for a year we sat down as an entire staff and tackled this beast. Using a single statement to guide us we cut and chopped and moved and edited. Each time we looked at a new topic or skill we referred back to that statement. If it didn't match we got rid of it. Many meetings and countless hours later we had a new, smaller, streamlined, and equally useless document.

I still have that document. It too is out of date and irrelevant.

So what's left?

The statement that guided us.

"Teachers should teach the technology skills they need to accomplish their educational goals."

That's it. No more, no less. No worrying about what they need when the graduate, or what they need for the next grade level. It all changes too fast anyway. Teach only what your students need in your classroom today. Tomorrow will be different anyway.

1 comment:

  1. Absolutely right Alex. I elaborate more later today.

    ReplyDelete