English 345: Tuesday, September 27

"Some severe criticisms of the approach have been summarised by Kelly, and he puts out that the most fundamental criticism is that philosophically it reduces people to the level of automatons who can be trained to behave in particular ways..." the Anthology states in regard to the curriculum plan of Reconstructionism (72). Pretty harsh if you ask me, but I can see how that could happen if an instructor uses only this type of curriculum plan and takes all of the "unambiguous" descriptions of the behavior to be performed to the absolute literal in every lesson plan. However, I just cannot see that happening; there is bound to be gray area when a person is teaching.

That being said, I find that the process model of curriculum development to be especially useful for language learners--or learners in any classroom really:  "The goals of education are not defined in terms of particular ends or products, but in terms of the processes and procedures by which the individual develops understanding and awareness and creates possibilities for future learning" (73). In this approach, language learners are not graded just on that finished project, a research paper for instance. Rather, they can also be graded on just how much they learned by working on that paper regardless of what the final project may look like. This process approach takes into account the cultural differences that language learner always bring to school assignments, including the research paper. How one does a "research paper" may be different in every country, and the "way" we do it here in Illinois is very much culturally constructed. Considering that process, how much they learned, also alleviates some of the pressure from the students, as the final outcome is not all that counts; how much they learned and what they can apply to further language learning matters, as well.

I appreciated that the chapter on lesson planning opened up with an "Alice in Wonderland" quotation, one of my favorite books and words that ring extremely true when planning a lesson. However, this chapter left out an extremely important, often difficult, concept that all high school or middle school teachers will have to deal with: Lesson planning for different sections of the same class (for examples, having four different classes of regular freshman English). These classes themselves, although labeled the same and working on the same projects, may need less or more time on different activities (or just may get off track more). Thus, adapting lesson plans also means making sure that each class is on the right track and remains with those educational objectives. While this may sound easy, making sure to tell each class the same thing--especially if the lesson changed can also be extremely challenging.