Teacher Belief Inventory: Curricular Coherence

Our class, and myself as a member of the class, all seem to hold views in line with Grant Wiggins's Chapter 10: "Curricular Coherence and Assessment: Making Sure That the Effect Matches the Intent." It's not at all surprising. We are aspiring teachers who have had these values inculcated by our professors, and most if not all of us sincerely do believe in the ideals that go with featuring mostly 1s and 2s or 3s or 4s in our responses. For me, it remains to be seen what will happen when I am teaching a class and it's up to me whether to cave to the system or stand up for myself and my students.

I'll close with what I can't help but noting is hugely ironic. Wiggins (113), in discussing the folly of learning by study rather than by doing, offers us this baseball analogy.

"To understand the complaint, consider how difficult mastering baseball [teaching] would be if we had to learn the game through a syllabus based on the logic of the rules codified in the rule book, by a methodical study of the box scores of past important games in chronological order, and by a logic of drill that went from offense to defense and simple to complex hitting, catching, and throwing--without ever actually playing the game [teaching]."

I not only agree with Wiggins about the folly of this approach, I've seen it practiced in how we teach teachers to teach. Just substitute the words I've put in blue bracketed text in the quote above in place of  Wiggins's original text and my point will be pretty clear. I'm just sayin'...