Tag: Curriculum Design

Student freedom

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The cheerless depictions of our public schools from the 1800s are famously etched in our minds by writers like Charles Dickens and memorialized in countless black-and-white photos of pupils staring forward, blankly, with arms folded, behind rows of wooden desks. As we fast forward a couple of centuries, these images have been replaced by a more colorful assortment of engaging lessons and student interactions more befitting a 21st Century education. Yes, yes, have no worry. It is true that across the wide landscape of public schools we have made progress in discovering greater collaboration among children, richer technologies in use, and even deeper relationships among teachers and students. The monochromatic curriculum and routines of the past are harder to find, and that is a good…

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school children, student engagement, engaging lessons

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Somewhere along the way, we have lost our way. Across our communities and our schools, we rush about in a manic fashion to finish this task or that one that it is no wonder why we don’t enjoy the moment or (sometimes) even remember it. It was Hall of Fame golfer Walter Hagen who first asked us to “stop and smell the flowers.” How quickly we forget. Much like life outside of school, life inside the classroom feels much too rushed for our teachers and children in light of their mad dash to “cover everything.” We all understand that a certain amount of material must be mastered to proceed from one grade to the next – even from one course to the next. Still, if…

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Summer affords all educators some much-needed time to reflect upon and improve our practice and industry. Like many of you, I am bent on mastering the art and science of teaching and my latest quest for answers took me to a book that most would find terribly dense and boring: The Struggle for the American Curriculum from 1893-1958 by Herbert Kliebard. It’s a book for those curriculum nerds like me who want to understand why we teach what we teach. It’s a short history of the key curriculum changes in American secondary schools during the early 1900s. Kliebard begs to explain why we do what we do and he names the men (very few women voices were heard in the 1920s and 30s) whose philosophies shaped…

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Children, love, respect, dignity

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Our industry’s ongoing experimentation with personalized learning has seen some interesting (even troubling ) twists and turns as educators, industry leaders, and policy-makers try to sort out a common definition of what we mean by it and a set of best practices that captures what it looks like in action. As with many things in education, it is fair to say that we might be making this simple concept into something much more complicated (even controversial) than is necessary. In fact, maybe our parameters around personalized learning should remain fluid as long as our actions begin and end with valuing each child as a person, and providing each one a learning path that is unique unto themselves. In fact, with the lives of so many…

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mlk, advice for educators

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The grand experiment that we know of as public education continues to be our best hope to inspire freedom and prosperity across all races and eradicate the grim realities of economic inequality. Teachers, administrators, students and staff boldly engage in this experiment daily and continue to champion the cause that has yet to live up to its promise. In honor of our successes and in recognition of our persistent struggles, it seems only right to review what Dr. King taught us as we wrestle with the complexities of culturally relevant instruction.   Lesson #1: Judge students not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a…

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rigor, instructional rigor

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The ongoing debate in education about what we want all children to know and be able to do has raged on for decades and leaves us all to question and argue the merits of our current standards, assessments and pacing guides that seem to expect so much of our students and teachers with little regard for whether any of this is really doable. The instructional shifts required by the Common Core Standards (or whatever your state calls them) has contributed to this notion that these core competencies must required of all children and all we have to do is practice them over and over. What rarely surfaces in all this dialogue is the very real issue of foundational skills that must be mastered in order to…

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Chalkboard, old-school

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Cultural competence training among teachers and leaders and its related pedagogy have arrived with such bombast that one might think the system we now have is outmoded (which it is), uninspiring (which it is) and that there are scads of children tuned out (which they are) because we have somehow failed (which we have) to connect with them in any relevant way. Of course, it is not true that cultural competence has only recently arrived on the scene but it is true that our industry is finally catching up with what the kids have been telling us for years, that learning is about them and their needs, that we have got to meet them where they are before we can expect them to go where…

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