Snags in Action Research due to CScope

We left the 2011-21 school year with the loom of CScope curriculum hanging in the air. Upon our return we find that it is true. Our campus will be following CScope. This decision by our administration has decidedly put a cramp into my action research plan.

CScope curriculum are lesson plans in a can, as I call them. The curriculum is all planned, labeled, paced, and resourced for the teachers. While administration understandably sees this curriculum as a positive tool for keeping all teachers on the same academic rigor, I see it as being pigeon-holed and having my creative wings clipped. Also, I have had the rug pulled out from under me on two years of work with Project Based Learning that I was trained for at Manor New Tech High School's Think Forward program, which I was going to incorporate into my action research technology project. Needless to say, I have run into a snag.

However, as a good teacher does, I am following the CScope curriculum and manipulating the activities to play nicely with project-based learning and my implementation of Google into the classroom. Last week, on September 18, 2012 I started an activity about Gilded Age Society, and used the performance indicator as my assessment. The performance indicator called for students to create a storyboard to show how technological innovations and scientific discoveries of the Gilded Age affected society in urban and rural areas. Instead of the physical storyboard, I had students create a presentation in Google Docs. For the students who had Google accounts, I paired them in groups of four and introduced the web 2.0 feature through Google Chrome.

A positive note about the CScope curriculum is that the curriculum offers a variety of online resources for students to use when researching information. Therefore, I instructed the students to use these resources because they were researched as being viable. However, students were having difficulty with some of the vocabulary used in the articles; and not the historical jargon as expected but words and phrases such as "hotly debated" and "dominated."  This is where I directed students to dictionary.com for answers, or found myself teaching reading skills about context clues to eleventh graders. Definitely not what I expected.

In conclusion, though I had worked for two years on project-based learning, I find myself in the shoes of a new teacher with a totally new curriculum and trying to keep my action research plan in motion. However, as a leader I am setting an example and following the curriculum set forth by the school, but just weaving my aesthetic into the curriculum. By doing this, I am diversifying the environment of my classroom and showing the adaptability of a good teacher and CScope curriculum