"Curriculum Doesn't Happen in a Vacuum" — An Interview with Dr. Carol Tomlinson, Professor in the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia

Hi, I'm Kathleen Burke, Director of ASCD's Annual Conference. Welcome to ASCD's Annual Conference Online 2002.

We are pleased to present a series of online programs that will preview topics and highlights of the 2002 Annual Conference. Joining us now from her home in Charlottesville, Virginia, is Dr. Carol Tomlinson, Professor in the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia.

Carol, what are the major issues influencing educators today?

I think educators face whatever issues the world faces. Education in some ways is always a microcosm of the world, and we live in a complicated world that has many issues, and teachers face all those with the students who come to school everyday having lived with those issues in one form or another at night. I think that each of us probably focuses on particular issues because if all of us looked at all of them all of the time, we'd probably sink. But two that are of particular concern to me that I think are among many others important today, and maybe I'll add a third one, is the changing nature of our students — the fact that we have so many students with so many different strengths and needs and ways that they learn best. And the huge challenge for teachers of learning to understand a variety of cultures, learning to understand a fuller range of achievement than they might once have focused on. Coming to understand issues of gender, of poverty, of varied experiences. Coming to understand what it means to be intelligent in many ways instead of just in one way. So I think the challenge of academic diversity is certainly one challenge that teachers face today that is a large one.

That's compounded for teachers today by the whole high-stakes testing movement. I'm a proponent of standards in any profession. I don't know how we could function well if we didn't have standards to serve as benchmarks. I'm always concerned about the quality of the standards and to make sure that they are standards that help us do a fuller, richer job with students, rather than paring down education to something that trivializes it. But standards, I think, are essential to our profession. On the other hand, high-stakes testing — which tends to give teachers the clear message that all students are essentially the same person and should learn the same material in the same way over the same time period and be ready for the same test on which they should all achieve the same goal during the same month of the year — makes it very difficult for teachers because they face what appear to be two very contradictory pressures. On the one hand to address the range of students they have, and on the other hand to ignore the differences and prepare everybody for a test that probably, given what we know about psychometrics and testing, carries more weight than it should.

I think, beyond that, there is always the problem of helping people understand the complexity of schools and understand and appreciate both the power and importance of the teacher's role. I'm not sure that we have done as good a job in education as we should have the last decade or so in helping the public understand the immense job that teachers do in schools and the odds with which they work with great dignity and often with great success. I feel like if we had a higher understanding level in the public side of that and a greater sense of trust, that the job of teachers would be made easier. I'm afraid that we sometimes cast teachers in a light of distrust. And of course what that does is keep the public from being their partners as much as from being their watchdogs, and I'd love to see us change that as well.

What do you plan on sharing with the ASCD Annual Conference audience during your presentation?

One of the things that I'll be focusing on is the issue of creating classrooms that are invitational to students who have different strengths and different needs. It occurs to me, though my specialty is curriculum and much of the time I work with curriculum, that curriculum doesn't happen in a vacuum, it has to happen in an environment, and sometimes I think we take for granted that the classroom environment will develop itself, that something appropriate will happen. I think most of us, as teachers, have our hearts in the right places and want environments to be positive for students. But I think that creating a really positive classroom environment — in which students who struggle with learning and students who are very advanced, students who come from a majority culture and who also come from a minority culture, students who speak English and those who don't yet speak English proficiently, students with a range of handicaps, all feel a sense of connection and a sense of importance, a sense of value — is really quite tricky to do.

And so what I'd really like to talk about is what it means to be an architect of a community of learning in which all students come to understand that this is a place where growth is expected and that to do less is really not a good thing. But that when folks are trying to grow, there are teachers and students who are partners in that, so that there really is a further examination of learning environments that nurture everything else we try to do with curriculum and with instruction and with assessment in classrooms.

How does the issue of "health" impact the work in a differentiated classroom?

I think health is obviously the root system of very much of what we do in classrooms, and a child, for example, who doesn't come to school appropriately fed on numbers of occasions certainly has major challenges ahead of them in the classroom accomplishing what they should be able to accomplish in the time they have there. Students who don't have regular care from physicians certainly are at much greater risk than other students would be, not only in reacting to health issues but in creating a healthy environment so that they can grow up in a more positive rather than a reactive kind of sense. There also are quite a number of students who have health issues, when you look at students with things like diabetes, which is a growing issue among young people, students with asthma, students with attention deficit problems or hyperactivity, learning disabilities. All of those really fall into the health range and can greatly impact students, as can a number of physical handicaps and chronic diseases. I would add to that maybe broadening the sense of health a little bit, though Dr. Elders may be addressing this as well, is the mental health of students when they come from homes where there is a sense of threat versus a sense of security, a sense that the world shakes under their feet as opposed to being a strong platform on which they can stand. Health, for all of us, adults and children alike, is our primary building block, and so in a way there is really nothing more basic to classroom success.

Thank you, Carol. And thanks to our Internet audience for tuning in to one of a series of online programs previewing the ASCD's 2002 Annual Conference in San Antonio. Check back this time next week when we will post the next program, featuring Beverly Showers. Before you leave this site, take a few minutes to visit the ASCD Annual Conference web page for the latest conference updates. I'm Kathleen Burke.