The Qatar Blog: The Moorman's Experiences in Qatar

We have begun to examine the Qatar Curriculum Standards, not unlike standards in North Carolina and other States in the US. Yesterday I carefully walked them through four introductory paragraphs for the English standards. We used two column notes to identify main ideas and supporting details. It took an hour and a half. For homework they were to read the description of the one page overview of Reading and Writing standards: four subsections, a total of seven paragraphs. They were to use the two column notes technique, and come up with questions to ask in class today. For two hours today we covered ONLY the vocabulary; here's a partial list: shared context, enlarged texts, independent reading, reading intensively, fluency, leveled texts, extensive reading, decoding, predicting, cueing, sefl-monitoring, self-correction, word knowledge, phonics, spelling knowledge, deciphering, information gathering strategies, inference, deduction, induction, evaluation, narrrative, fiction, non-fiction, systematic progression, non-chronological progression, persuasive texts, organizational features, genre, explicit, implicit, direct instruction, generative spelling strategies, bilingual-monolingual-multilingual, planning-revising-editing, transcribe, shared composition. Almost all these words from the text generated other vocabulary that was necessary to explain these technical terms.

A couple of insights for me. First, this is for non-native English speaking teacher to teach, in English, to non-native speaking students. Second, if I was teaching this to a class in America, I would assume that the students had all this vocabulary under control. But as I began to explain all this words, I found them difficult to explain and highly technical. It was an absolutely terrific discussion, and every student was involved throughout, but it really made me think about how useful these standards are in practice. Here of course it's almost absurd, But in the US, it's only slightly better. Who writes these standards? And in the end, how many people can really understand them?