(Re)Defining Priorities: Teachers’ Perspectives on Supporting Diverse Learners Within a Flexible Curriculum in a High-stakes Testing Atmosphere

• Main Author: Hainer-Violand, Julia
• Other Authors: Simon, Robert
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: Teacher Agency; Curriculum Design; Bilingual Learners; Practitioner Research; Teacher Student Relationship; Instruction; Common Core State Standards; Standardized Testing; New Literacy Studies; Student Engagement; 0727; 0282; 0279; 0524
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/42622

This thesis investigates how teachers navigate Common Core State Standards, high-stakes testing, and teacher evaluation while creating their own curriculum to meet the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse students. As a former teacher, I conducted a practitioner research case study of four successful colleagues in a bilingual Pre-K-8 school in Washington, DC. When given flexibility in curriculum, teachers integrated knowledge from their relationships with students to foster a caring environment that supports learning and created their own systems of accountability by deciding what data matters. Teachers centered student engagement as what drives their curriculum and used a variety of differentiation methods based on their own “toolbox” of instructional strategies. Findings suggest a flexible curriculum model allows teachers to be curriculum makers who actively go beyond the standards to integrate knowledge from their practice and relationships with students to create curriculum that successfully supports language learners.