I recently resigned from a position I have loved for the last three and a half years--Humanities 10 Curriculum Team Leader (CTL). I'll still be on the team; I just won't be leading it. Choosing to step down was difficult. Before the work I've done with the team gets too far in the rearview mirror, I wanted to capture the arc of my experience here.
When the two Humanities Department Chairs offered me the opportunity to step in as Humanities 10 CTL, I had no idea how central that role would become to my work or how many opportunities it would afford me to work with colleagues all across campus. In the way that Culver’s mission commits to “developing and nurturing the whole individual,” my role as CTL and work nurtured me—it became an opportunity to develop the curriculum and personnel of the department and, by extension, to work with adults across the school. In turn, I experienced incredible personal and professional growth.
For a long while, my favorite meeting of the month was with my Chairs. Together, they mentored me into the CTL position, helped me make several course corrections along the way, advised me on personnel and programming questions, rooted me deeply in the foundational principles of the department’s work, and then gave me wings to develop the tenth grade curriculum and team. They encouraged collaboration among the members of the Leadership Team (the Chairs plus the other level CTLs), and we made strides towards vertical alignment in the department for a more cohesive department curriculum. They set a tone of respect and professionalism, and they could both be trusted.
The revision of the “What is Humanities?” document (one of the foundational department documents) by the 2014-2015 Leadership Team started on a Friday night in April of 2015. The 9th grade CTL and I had a meeting about some Leadership Team work, and that conversation fueled a Friday night revision frenzy on my part that then led to a series of email messages and LT conversations about curriculum design (and revision of the document). What a team that was.
The work of the LT in 2015 was in concert with the development of the tenth grade curriculum. In 2013, when I first came back to Culver, I was handed a small Amazon box of five books. While the level's curriculum clearly didn't begin with my arrival, I felt I needed to find more direction than what I had in that box. The Writing Program (in its most boiled down form, a common writing assessment given to the entire tenth grade) was in its infancy, and the tenth grade team had no idea what we were doing in assessment design; it was a year of building the bridge as we crossed it with our students in tow. For some assessments, we were modifying the rubric the day before; for others, we were still modifying the test itself the day before (despite our collective understanding of the importance of backwards design).
February 6, 2015 was my first level meeting as CTL. The Chairs had given me three clear targets that I shared with the Humanities 10 Team at that meeting:
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Writing Program 2.0—aligning assessments to reflect the skills and content of the course
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Humanities Units—building units based in a common text/context
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Grading Course Goals
And that day we started moving beyond just the “texts” to actual “units of study.” At the time, we didn’t even have a name for the units—just the titles of the central texts. Our first day of work on a unit articulation started with this question about our Term 3 text and the team’s answers:
The Swallows of Kabul—At the end of a unit of study based in the text of
The Swallows of Kabul, what are the key understandings to come from that unit for our students?
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environment and its impact on the characters of the novel
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geography—how to learn about geography
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how people respond to their environment
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isolation—physical and metaphysical, effects on sense of self
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various forms of violence
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Islam—what it is and what it isn’t, define terms of extremism and fundamentalism
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Islam/elements of Islam
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Taliban—what allowed it to come into power
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fundamentalism versus devotion
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metaphor (and other literary devices) and how they function within the work and beyond the work (what are the stories of the characters in the book a metaphor for?)
This was the beginning of a three-and-a-half year journey of Humanities curriculum development for the tenth grade team. Because we all had books, and we had all been teaching books, we started with the books. But we had a lot of work to do to articulate how each unit would contribute to our students’ understanding of what it means “to be persons, understood holistically, and to live human lives governed by human ends” (WiH 1.0).
As the Hum 10 team changed each year, I continued to work with each new team to develop the unit articulations. We went from that first fuzzy list of concepts to well-defined understandings that help students understand the relationship between text and context. We discussed the unit articulations before we taught the units, then we met again at the end of a unit of study to revise them. We vetted supplementary sources for each unit in an effort to expose students to a variety of types of texts within a unit (WiH) and to prompt a deeper dive into the context for each central text. We left space for individual teacher experimentation and autonomy. We became the level that was teaching students “-isms”—imperialism, cosmopolitanism, fundamentalism, globalism.
The Writing Program
As we developed the unit articulations to ensure that we were teaching Humanities units, I also pushed the level to design and deliver Writing Program assessments that were in congruence with the skills and content of the level. I also pushed us to develop the assessments and the accompanying rubrics prior to the terms in which we would be using them. Over the course of three years, the level went from major overhauls of the rubric ( versions 1.0, 2.0, 3.0) to adjustments (versions 5.1, 5.2, 5.3) to tweaks (versions 7.0, 7.1). The rubric was meant to reflect the writing skills we were teaching in our classrooms.
When the ninth grade team made adjustments to their writing expectations, I made sure that the tenth grade team worked in concert with them so that students would experience a more coherent progression through the writing instruction at the levels. When the eleventh grade team made the shift to American Studies with APLAC, the tenth grade team modified the language of the rubric to more closely reflect the language of theirs. I pushed the Leadership Team to have conversations about the 11th grade writing targets so that the work at the lower levels would support students’ transition to the rigorous curriculum of the eleventh grade. When new members joined the team, I onboarded them to the Hum 10 Writing Program and then listened to and incorporated their suggestions for improvement into each assessment and rubric.
We also developed the Writing Program assessments themselves. As each unit articulation was refined each term, the level chose a content focus for the end-of-term assessment that reflected what the level valued in that unit. Then we revised or developed the assessment from that choice. We weren’t teaching to the test, we were testing what we taught. We all learned more about assessment design.
We evolved the format of the assessments and scoring. I listened to the level’s concerns about the in-class essay format of the assessments, and I developed a proposal for a multi-draft out-of-class essay (OCE) format that the team vetted, modified, and tried. When we weren’t satisfied with the first version of the OCE, we modified the process again. When teachers expressed concerns over the amount of time they were spending scoring other teachers’ essays before then spending a weekend reading and commenting on their own students’ essays, I developed a proposal for a new system of scoring that would still align with and honor the principles of the original Writing Program design while allowing teachers more time with their own students’ essays. After the tenth-grade team tried and liked the new scoring system, the ninth-grade team adopted it, too. And as we developed the assessments, we developed as teachers. Together. And all without tears (no small feat given the culture of the level early on).
Tenth Grade Reading
We also grew as readers and teachers of readers. It was apparent that we all had room to grow in our understanding of the Bard. The level started their “text talks” in the back room of Papa’s on Sunday nights in the fall of 2015. We called it “The Bard and some Brews” and some of us fumbled our way through
The Merchant of Venice together while enjoying an adult beverage. Those Sunday night text talks transitioned to optional Tuesday level talks where we read and discussed each term’s central text together. Eventually, individual level members took responsibility for a term’s talks and planned the professional development experience for their colleagues. In years when we added several new members (e.g. seven of our ten level members were new in 2017), we studied the central texts together. In years when most level members were returning, we studied the unit’s supplementary texts. During one term last year, several members prepared and shared lectures for the team. Over the years, several people have shared that those text talks were their favorite meetings of the week.
We taught
Purple Hibiscus one year. And we had a horrible book called
The Underdogs on our reading list (so none of us actually taught it). We briefly added
Frankenstein back into the curriculum for a year. At one point we had four novels and a play. And then the level determined that four central texts would be ideal; each of the five texts we had were “of sufficient depth and merit to bear th[e] weight”(WiH) of a full term of study, and there were only four terms in a year. While some at the level wanted to take
The Merchant of Venice off the tenth grade team’s slate, The Program Chair and I knew that eliminating it would require a larger discussion in the Humanities department about the role of Shakespeare in the Humanities curriculum. Still, we took a gamble and held the conversation hoping that the level would land on
Merchant as one of the four texts. It did.
Since that conversation, the tenth grade has not changed central texts. I did learn from the time that we added
Frankenstein to the mix and gave teachers little time to prepare during a June Week (end of school year) discussion, that the level needed to be more careful in making major changes to the curriculum. So when members new to the level asked last year about changing texts, I engineered a June Week conversation through which the team could develop both a process/timeline for text review or selection and key characteristics of potential replacement texts and/or additional central texts. I wanted to help level members feel like they had a voice in the curriculum while also helping us all keep an eye on the guiding Humanities principles.
Essential Questions, Justice, and Rationality
While a number of essential question combinations had been floating around the department and level for quite some time, as each unit developed, a clear common focus seemed to emerge. Our units all addressed issues related to justice in each of the societies we studied. We formalized the adoption of these essential questions for the Humanities 10 year in the Spring of 2016:
What defines a just society? What creates injustice in societies? What makes it difficult to perceive injustice? What is the role of the individual in responding to injustice?
Certainly, these essential questions directly follow the mandate of the school’s mission to “educate students for leadership and responsible citizenship.” After all our other unit articulation and Writing Program discussions, adopting these essential questions breathed new life into our teaching conversations. How would putting these essential questions in front of our students make shifts to our thinking when we taught? To students’ thinking as they wrestled with the texts and contexts?
The question, “What makes injustice so hard to perceive?” demands attention to the rationality work of Kahneman. The question of what defines a just society demands attention to the work of Mills, Bentham, Rawls, Kant, and Aristotle. We have aspirations to make our sophomores “think inquisitively, critically, and reflectively while demonstrating an understanding of “fast and slow” thinking to enhance interpretive, analytical, and evaluative approaches specific to the humanities,” and to add this layer, we have a lot of additional work to do together as a teaching team.
resign: give up, surrender, abandon, submit; relinquish
The Dean of Faculty asked me if there was some project I wanted to finish or some work that I felt I still wanted to do before I resigned my position as CTL. There are a hundred things I’d still like to do. It can’t be one thing. Being a CTL is a complex juggling job, and I’ve been keeping a lot of balls in the air for a lot of years. And as my best friend would say, “It’s not just balls. It’s a ball, an apple, a sword, a candle, a cat, a bicycle… and you are smiling while you do it.” Dropping them all and walking away in the middle of the act is painful (and promises to be a bit dull).
I’ve been on six different tenth-grade teams in the six years I’ve been in the department. One year, we had ten team members. One year, we had five. Some years, Fellows (our "interns") have been the only additions. Some years, the part-timers at the level outnumber the full-timers. To develop a curriculum while attending to the needs of the teachers at the level is a delicate balance, and I haven’t always gotten it right. But I have always worked hard to keep programming goals in mind to make the best decisions for our students, while also focusing on the colleagues in my care.
