(Vol. 1, No. 2 - Spring/Summer 1997)

Louisville Teacher Cadre Profile: Curt Matter

"Mr. Matt" to his social studies students, Curt Matter's classroom at Highland Middle School is piled high with resource materials collected over 19 years of teaching. He can't bear to throw any of it away. "I need a file clerk," he says. Yet he is just as likely to build his lessons around a current event that sparks a lively discussion.

Lately, Matter has been thinking more deeply about whether exciting his students about learning is enough to help them meet academic standards. When he returned from his first teacher cadre session on authentic assessments a few months ago, he understood even more clearly that a lesson might engage student interest without having enough academic foundation.

He had begun to think this way earlier as an organizer of the annual Pioneer Jamboree at Highland, an activity that required a lot of work and supposedly was a learning experience for students who chose a pioneer identity to play and to write about. But it wasn't anchored in strong academic goals, Matter realized.

Contrast this with the trial authentic assessment this pony-tailed, dynamic teacher developed in March. He used the rain-induced flooding of the Ohio Valley and its effect on Louisville as a take-off for study that included economics, geography, and history (see "The Flood of '97").

Matter has been involved in schoolwide change for many years. At Highland, he was part of a principal's team that revised the curriculum to make it coherent from grade to grade and adapt it to the school's international studies focus. "What we did fits like a glove with KERA and KIRIS," he says.

As a cadre teacher, Matter doesn't see a need to "reinvent the wheel" for teachers, but he believes thinking about authentic assessment can hone what teachers already are doing. A single parent who delivers papers in the morning as a second job, Matter understands the constraints of time. He anticipates that authentic assessments will require a larger commitment -- just learning how to score the assessments will be a big challenge, he says.

The performance aspect of the new assessments will fit into Matter's teaching style--he asks lots of questions and expects students to evaluate each others' papers (each paper is checked three times, giving students a chance to reinforce their learning and discover what good work is). He may give regular classes more time to do assignments than his advanced classes, but "all my students can do high level work."

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