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Meghan Cureton

Stop Teaching Classes And Start Teaching Children - 0 views

  • Too often bits and pieces are tacked onto curriculum as yet another perfectly-reasonable-sounding-thing to teach.
  • There is nothing wrong with changes in priority. In fact, this is a signal of awareness and reflection and vitality. But when education—as it tends to do—continues to take a content and skills-focused view of what to teach rather than how students learn, it’s always going to be a maddening game of what gets added in, and what gets taken out, with the loudest or most emotionally compelling voices usually winning.
  • Skills are things students can “do”—procedural knowledge that yields the ability to do something. This could be revising an essay, solving a math problem, or decoding words to read. Content can be thought of as a second kind of knowledge—a declarative knowledge that often makes up the face of a content area. In math, this might be the formula to calculate the area of a circle. In composition, it could be a writing strategy to form sound and compelling paragraphs. In history, it may refer to the geographic advantages of one country in a conflict versus another. Should schools focus on content and skills, or should they focus on habits and thinking?
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  • So then, hundreds of standards. Hundreds! This places extraordinary pressure on educators—those who develop standards, those who create curriculum from those standards, those who create lessons from that curriculum, and on and on—to make numerous—and critical—adjustments to curriculum, assessment, and instruction on the fly.
  • Why not try a different approach–one that not only decenters curriculum, but reimagines it completely?
  • Building A Curriculum Based On People
  • n the past, we’ve sought to add-to and revise. Add these classes and drop these. This isn’t as important as this. To make knowledge an index that reflects the latest thinking that reflects our most recent insecurities and collective misunderstandings. This doesn’t seem like the smartest path to sustainable innovation in learning.
  • Give me a curriculum based on people–based on their habits and thinking patterns in their native places. One that helps them see the utility of knowledge and the patterns of familial and social action. One that helps them ask, “What’s worth knowing, and what should I do with what I know?” Then let’s work backwards from that.
Meghan Cureton

transforming_teaching_learning_and_assessment.pdf - 1 views

  • T o make space for learner voice and to promote learner agency, teachers must set up learning environments that stimulate active learner engagement with meaningful and progressively challenging tasks that stimulate their thinking and enable them to develop competence over time. Unlike subject content, competence cannot be transmitted to learners. Rather, competence is progressively developed by learners through appropriate facilitation.
  • Table 1. The Role of Learners in Competence-Based Curricula
  • A “growth mindset” (Dweck, 2006). essential for developing intrinsic motivation.
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  • Deep learning
  • The extent of emotional, cognitive, and behavioral engagement influences the effectiveness of learning, and thus, the development of competence.
  • These modes of learning blur boundaries between teachers and learners, as learners progressively take responsibility for their own learning.
  • Success also rests on profound teacher understanding of curricula that should accrue during curriculum design and development stages. Such understanding is crucial for the teachers’ buy-in, conviction, ownership, and commitment to effective curricula implementation.
  • Within the curriculum continuum, assessment has significant potential to support and reinforce curriculum reform. However, it equally has enormous potential to distort the official/intended curriculum.
  • When appropriate strategies are used in assessment, they can support the implementation of the official curriculum, enhance learning, and lead to an enrichment effect. However, gaining these benefits of appropriate assessment demands a specialized knowledge of assessment by all concerned.
  • Another critical policy message is that competence-based assessment and examinations systems require significant investment in the professionalization of teachers as assessors of learning. Competence-based assessments also require trust in teachers’ ability to make reliable judgements and to utilize assessment as an inherent and important part of teaching and learning.
  • A key policy message is that education and learning systems cannot succeed at adopting competence-based approaches to curriculum without similarly transforming teaching, learning, as well as assessment and examination systems. All the three elements must be aligned. Transforming curricula to competence-based approaches and leaving teaching, learning, assessment, tests, and examinations subject-based is tantamount to not transforming curricula.
  • In competence-based approaches, teachers are not just co-designers and co-developers of curricula. They are also pivotal co-assessors, co-testers, and co-examiners.
  • Most importantly, competence-based curricula must lead quality assessment rather than be led by poor practice assessments, tests, and examinations.
  • What "developmental progression" means, in general terms, and an understanding that progressing is neither linear nor necessarily agerelated. Rather, it is iterative, interactive, and dependent on making connections to prior learning and to context;
  • it is best to base judgements on a number of different criterion referenced assessments.
  • Effective teacher professional development must include all 4 componen ts: • Knowledge – worthwhile research-informed theory, content, and expertise; • Integrated pedagogical and assessment skills and strategies; • Modelling, demonstrating, and engaging with approaches, ideally in settings that approximate to the workplace; • Practicing the approaches frequently over a substantial period of time between professional inputs; (2–6 months a minimum) with ongoing and follow up evaluation of impact and refinement; • Concurrent dialogue/coaching/peer collaboration in activities such as lesson planning, preparing related resources, peer observation, discussion, and reflection on impact
  • Table 4. Success of different methods of professional development Training Components Outcomes % of participants who demonstrate Kno wledge % of participants who demonstrate new Skills % of participants who transfer into Classroom Practice Theoretical Knowledge and Discussion 10%5%0% Demonstration in Training 30%20%0% Practice and Feedback in Training 60%60%5% Coaching in Classroom Settings 95%95%95%
  • Teaching still lacks core characteristics that define a profession, vis: (i) a profession-specific, systematized, scientific body of knowledge that informs the daily activities of practitioners; (ii) a lengthy period of higher education training and induction; (iii) engagement in continuous professional development; and (iv) autonomy to exercise professional judgement and decision-making in practice and in governance over the profession
Meghan Cureton

02_future_competences_and_the_future_of_curriculum_30oct.v2.pdf - 1 views

shared by Meghan Cureton on 17 Jul 18 - No Cached
T.J. Edwards liked it
  • An analysis of current contributions show that although there are substantial variations, most agree that competence is far more complex than skill, and that it comprises knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes.
  • The most recurring examples include: – Creativity, communication, critical thinking, problem solving, curiosity, metacognition; – Digital, technology, and ICTs skills; – Basic, media, information, financial, scientific literacies and numeracy, – Cross-cultural skills, leadership, global awareness; – Initiative, self-direction, perseverance, responsibility, accountability, adaptability; and – Knowledge of disciplines, STEM mindset.
  • Key challenges
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  • Many contributors agree that a competence is a complex construct, comprising knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, etc. But in the actual listing of the competences, they mix competences with their constituent elements.
  • Lack of evident interaction across elements of competences:
  • Lack of a common starting point:
  • Varied taxonomies:
  • Lack of a common language and common concepts
  • In contrast to competence-based curricula, subject-based curricula are mostly grounded in an understanding of the subject matter content or the disciplines. They generally prepare learners to know the subject matters and to gain a deep understanding of advancements in the field. They don’t necessarily emphasize immediate use of acquired knowledge. The application is often deferred to real life situations that learners may confront later in life, forcing them to apply what they had learned. Because of insensitivity to context, it is often easy to have the same curriculum across different contexts, mostly borrowed from what are considered to be advanced contexts. The risk of irrelevance of the curriculum is also higher.
  • Lack of consensus on the structure of curricula:
  • While there is consensus on the need to transition to competence-based curricula, views on the structure of curricula remain divergent between the maintenance of traditional subjects and learning areas interwoven with competences, and the more radical view that curricula should be restructured around competences.
  • Feasibility of implementation:
  • Managing the transition:
  • Weak or unshared tracking of impact:
  • However, the world still lacks a global normative instrument that can be used as a global reference point for curricula transformation.
  • Competence is herein defined as the developmental capacity to interactively mobilize and ethically use information, data, knowledge, skills, values, attitudes, and technology to engage effectively and act across diverse 21 st century contexts to attain individual, collective, and global good.
  • Distinguishing Attributes of a Competence-based Curriculum
  • A competence-based curriculum is grounded in the understanding of the demands of the learners’ context.
  • Unclear standards and developmental progression:
  • A key consideration is how best to facilitate curriculum specialists to gain an in-depth understanding of the learners’ current and future contexts, and how to identify competences, which should be reflected in curricula.
  • Learner centeredness:
  • Competence-based curricula emphasize the ability to use what is learned. Acquisition is important but not sufficient.
  • Emphasis on outcomes or impact:
  • A key consideration is how to support educators to reach for the deeper impact of learning, and how to assess it.
  • Emphasis on trans-disciplinarity:
  • Especially at the post-primary level, a key consideration is how to enable educators to master their specific disciplines, and at the same time, to have adequate knowledge of other disciplines enough to make transdisciplinary linkages. Another challenge is how to design curricula in a way that makes linkages across subjects and learning areas.
  • Competence-based curricula are structured around competences and not around subjects, and progression relates to the competence rather than subject matter difficulty.
  • As the last word, competence-based curricula are not against subject matter content. Effective application of content across disciplines actually requires a high level of mastery of the content.
  • seven macro competences that are considered relevant across contexts. These are: (i) Lifelong learning; (ii) Self-agency; (iii) Interactively using diverse tools and resources; (iv) Interacting with others; (v) Interacting with the world; (vi) Multi-literateness; and (vii) Trans-disciplinarity. Because of their universality, macro competences are quite stable. They allow for curricula stability across transformations and reforms. They are the bigger picture and the overarching "why" of a curriculum.
  • Knowing how to learn is the most critical future competence.
  • The 21 st century requires people to be self-actualized agents.
  • Responsible use of tools and resources is also at the heart of responsible consumption and sustainable lifestyles, which contribute to sustainable development.
  • It demands collaboration to resolve complex problems and create integrated solutions across contexts.
  • This competence enables people to be local and global.
  • Different contexts will demand different types and levels of literacies.
  • Increasing complexity requires ever more sophisticated solutions that integrate knowledge from multiple disciplines and from domains of knowledge.
  • This framework therefore balances the need for dynamic change in curricula with the equal need for stability.
Bo Adams

College of Arts & Sciences to Pilot Groundbreaking Curriculum Changes | UVA Today - 0 views

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    .@UVA_College faculty at #UVA approve groundbreaking pilot of new liberal arts curriculum: https://t.co/6m4p8Op52T HT @jbrettjacobsen via @daveostroff
Meghan Cureton

What's Worth Learning in School? | Ed Magazine - 0 views

  • What’s worth learning in school?
  • “Conventional curriculum is chained to the bicycle rack,” he says. “It sits solidly in the minds of parents: ‘I learned that. Why aren’t my children learning it?’ The enormous investment in textbooks and the cost of revising them gives familiar elements of the curriculum a longer life span than they might perhaps deserve. Curriculum suffers from something of a crowded garage effect: It generally seems safer and easier to keep the old bicycle around than to throw it out.” As a result, “the lifeworthiness of the multitudinous facts and ideas in the typical curriculum is spotty,” he says. “It seems not to have been thought through very carefully.”
  • “Knowledge is for going somewhere,” Perkins says, not just for accumulating. But too often, we tend to focus on short-term successes — scoring well on a quiz, acing a spelling test. Unfortunately all of that test knowledge, all of that accumulated knowledge we thought was worth knowing, becomes useless if not used.
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  • The achievement gap asks if students are achieving X. Instead, it might be more useful to look at the relevance gap, which asks if X is going to matter to the lives students are likely to lead.
  • And then there’s what Perkins calls “the Holy Grail” of learning in school: becoming an expert. The typical math curriculum is a good example of how we want learners to move toward expertise in a subject, with little regard for usefulness. Arithmetic leads to algebra, including many “hardly used twists and turns” of advanced algebra, then to geometry and calculus, “an entire subject that hardly anyone ever uses,”
  • Perkins is very clear that expertise in a specific field is not bad; in fact, he encourages it and assumes it will happen at the college or university level. But he advocates that in today’s world, younger students need to first master the fundamentals of key learning and then decide where they want to specialize.
  • Instead, he does know that the encyclopedic approach to learning that happens in most schools that focuses primarily on achievement and expertise doesn’t make sense.
  • And to do that, Perkins says we need to rethink what’s worth learning and what’s worth letting go of — in a radical way.
  • “As the train started up and Gandhi tossed down his second sandal, he showed wisdom about what to keep and what to let go of,” Perkins says. “Those are both central questions for education as we choose for today’s learners the sandals they need for tomorrow’s journey.”
T.J. Edwards

Emergent Curriculum Design: Beginning with Shared Vision - 0 views

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    Great protocol to use in house or in MVIFI consults work
Bo Adams

Everyone a Changemaker - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The central challenge of our time, Drayton says, is to make everyone a changemaker.
  • Once a kid has had an idea, built a team and changed her world, she’s a changemaker. She has the power. She’ll go on to organize more teams. She will always be needed.
  • Today, schools have to develop the curriculums and assessments to make the changemaking mentality universal.
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  • Social transformation flows from personal transformation.
  • Drayton wants to make universal a quality many people don’t even see: agency.
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    "Today, schools have to develop the curriculums and assessments to make the changemaking mentality universal. They have to understand this is their criteria for success."
Meghan Cureton

Learning's Not a River - Dan Cristiani - Medium - 0 views

  • the word ‘course’ is related to the running of a river
  • Its hallmarks include rapidity, unidirectionality, linearity, and dependency.
  • when a student takes a course, she is being led at pace down a narrow path in one direction.
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  • The overwhelming bulk of our personal growth happens in open environments, without constraints or schedules, and often without guidance.
  • Scholarly research on implicit learning and anecdotal studies of self-taught experts (musicians, chefs, athletes, and more) speak to the power of unstructured study.
  • In truth, courses are not how we organize learning; they are how we organize assessment.
  • what are the alternatives?
  • Perhaps schools would do well to offer up learning experiences rather than formalized courses in all grades
  • Schools can honor learning opportunities that exist outside of traditional coursework.
  • Schools can look for ways to decouple reporting on student performance from arbitrary time frames.
  • how can we create space for students who need more time to consolidate their learning, to master a curriculum or set of skills?
  • Administration and faculty should be willing to acknowledge that courses offer venues for intellectual and personal growth but do not have a monopoly on it.
Meghan Cureton

Are You Teaching Content Or Teaching Thought? - - 3 views

  • education has a thinking problem
  • Shouldn’t a school fail to function without urgent and divergent thinking?
  • our curriculum is content.
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  • If our job is to teach critical thinking, design, and problem-solving–fluid intelligence–then thinking is our collective circumstance, and our curriculum becomes thought.
  • To learn to think, students need powerful and inspiring models that reflect the design, citizenship, creativity, interdependence, affection, and self-awareness we claim to want them to have. To teach careful, creative, and truly innovative thinking, students need creative spaces and tools, and frameworks to develop their own criteria for quality and success. They need dynamic literacy skills that they practice and build upon endlessly. Not projects that have creativity and design thinking added on, but projects that can’t function without them. And they need control of it all.
  • Can we simply “update” things as we go, or is it time for rethinking of our collective practice?
Meghan Cureton

Neuroscience Should Inform School Policies - Education Week - 1 views

  • key secondary school reform efforts need to emphasize learning activities involving metacognition, goal-setting, planning, working memory, reflection on one's learning, and frequent opportunities to make responsible choices.
  • What is essential for kids at this time of life is to be engaged in real-life learning experiences and peer-learning connections that put them under conditions of "hot cognition," where educators can help them along in the process of integrating their impulsiveness (positively viewed as excitement and motivation) with their reasoning abilities.
  • The implications for reform of secondary school are clear. Schools should provide more opportunities for students to be involved in apprenticeships, internships, service learning, community-based learning, small peer-learning groups, entrepreneur-based programs, and student-directed project-based learning
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  • key part of the secondary school curriculum should involve the teaching of stress-reduction methods, such as mindfulness meditation, yoga, and aerobic activity; exercise breaks during class; a strong physical education curriculum; and a broadly based extracurricular sports program for all students, not just the star athletes.
  • Neuroscience Should Inform School Policies
  • prefrontal cortex, which is the region controlling inhibition of impulses and the ability to plan, reflect, self-monitor, and make good decisions, doesn't fully develop until the early 20s. This means that while the limbic system or "emotional brain" is working at close to full capacity by early adolescence, the areas of the brain that could temper those feelings and impulses are still in the process of being constructed.
  • Consequently, key secondary school reform efforts need to emphasize learning activities involving metacognition, goal-setting, planning, working memory, reflection on one's learning, and frequent opportunities to make responsible choices.
  • Classroom teaching that focuses largely on delivering content through lectures and textbooks fails to engage the emotional brain and leaves unchanged those prefrontal regions that are important in metacognition.
  • Locking students into a set academic college-bound program of courses takes away their ability to make decisions about what most interests them (a process that integrates the limbic system's motivational verve with the prefrontal cortex's decisionmaking capacity).
  • Neuroscience research tells us that the teenage brain is exquisitely sensitive to environmental influences. This neuroplasticity makes it vulnerable to a wide range of societal dangers—traffic accidents, drug abuse, suicide, violence. But it also makes it acutely sensitive to the influence of teachers, for good or for ill.
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    "key secondary school reform efforts need to emphasize learning activities involving metacognition, goal-setting, planning, working memory, reflection on one's learning, and frequent opportunities to make responsible choices."
Bo Adams

Meet the school with no classes, no classrooms and no curriculum - 0 views

  • their entire approach is centred around projects. This is a school focused on learning, not teaching.
  • Our teachers work five days, four days with kids, and on the fifth day I don’t allow them to work with kids, they have to observe other teachers and give them feedback.
  • And if they do that enough I say ‘get out of the school’, go to a museum, go to a laboratory, go to a business and tell us what you found there.
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  • Well if you look at the skills employers constantly cry out for: empathy, communication, teamwork, agility, flexibility, and the ability to design and make solutions to multidisciplinary problems
  • chief among their soft skills is a sense of confidence in their abilities to tackle problems and communicate with adults and each other.
Bo Adams

Equipping Young Leaders to Take on the 32 Most Important Issues of Our Time - Vander Ar... - 0 views

  • If we take citizenship preparation seriously, we should be encouraging young people to engage with the world’s most important issues by helping them frame projects around these goals. Here are six reasons:
  • Extended and integrated challenges are the best way to promote deeper learning and develop readiness for the automation economy. The goals include interesting and timely causes that many young people will find motivating. Making a contribution toward a goal they care about may be the best way to develop student agency. Goal focused projects get kids into the community and connected with local resources (see #PlaceBasedEd) It’s also a chance to shift the paradigm from “prepare for a career 10 years from now” to “make a difference right here, right now.” Taking on real challenges will promote creative and effective uses of technology from collaboration to production.
  • Integrate projects into existing courses. The Global Goals site has useful project resources for 16 of these goals. Plan an integrated unit between two courses. Most of the goals combine science, sociology, research, problem-solving and writing. Capstone projects in the last two years of high school are a good place to start. Each academy at Reynoldsburg High School in Ohio and Chavez Schools in Washington, D.C., engage in a capstone project. Students at Singapore American School are required to conduct a capstone project.
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  • To engage millions of students in local projects connected to global goals, it would be helpful to have: More content associated with each goal (GlobalGoals.org is a start); Templates for local projects; A microcredential system that could help pack projects full of valuable learning (i.e, science, math, communication and collaboration); Access to data sources, data tools and project tools (mentors would be really helpful); and A project gallery for completed contributions.
kellybkelly

Charles Fadel Champions Curriculum RedesignEducation & Teacher Conferences - 1 views

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    Interesting conversation that reminds me of our conversations in Summit.
Bo Adams

Education Experts Explain the Role Teachers Would Play for Students in Classrooms in a ... - 0 views

  • With so many different learning styles and students at different places in their learning within a grade and within subjects, students and schools will benefit greatly from co-teaching models.
  • Individual teachers will not be responsible for individual students as much as the team of teachers will be responsible for the learning outcomes of each student they touch within the school day.
  • The notion of “teacher” will change significantly in the future. The growing number of formal and informal learning options is causing an unbundling of the teacher role.
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  • In the future, we will see teachers choose among a variety of options, including:Content experts who focus on developing curriculum Small-group leaders who provide direct instruction Project designers to supplement online learning with hands-on application
 Mentors who provide wisdom, social capital, and guidance Evaluators to whom other educators can give the responsibility of grading assignments and, in some cases, designing assessments Data experts
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    HT @eijunkie
Bo Adams

Connected Learning - Curriculum Reflections - 0 views

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    "Why don't we offer more opportunities for students to pursue their interests and passions?"
Bo Adams

The Past, Present and Future of School Design | EdSurge News - 0 views

  • untapped opportunities involve further personalization of the curriculum, teaching, and assessment.
  • Schools will no longer be just free-standing buildings but will be more integrated into community life.
  • Segregating students by age will become less prevalent within learning spaces.
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    Tweet from @akytle: @jbrettjacobsen @boadams1 Here's part 2 #mvdesign The Past, Present and Future of School Design https://t.co/TQe1qbMklL #edtech via @EdSurge HT @akytle
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