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Meghan Cureton

Stop Teaching Classes And Start Teaching Children - 0 views

www.teachthought.com/...rity-to-a-curriculum-of-wisdom

School Change deeperlearning transformation learning inquiry

shared by Meghan Cureton on 03 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • 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?
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • 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.
Bo Adams

NAIS - The Homework Debate: What It Means for Lower Schools - 1 views

www.nais.org/...hat-it-means-for-lower-schools

homework

shared by Bo Adams on 26 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • daily amount a child reads independently is positively linked to higher-order literacy skills and long-term academic success. And there are activities that promote academic performance and wellness simultaneously: physical exercise (60 minutes per day); proper sleep (10–11 hours a night for young children); shared family meals (three or more per week); and time to explore talents, interests, and passions. 
Meghan Cureton

Grades are for Onions, Beef, and Other Produce; Not Children - 1 views

medium.com/...duce-not-children-5fd4728ff7b3

shared by Meghan Cureton on 03 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • What good is gained in assigning a grade to a child’s work? The concept of 90–100% = A, 80–89% = B etc. is so entirely subjective and fraught with fallacy. Because a child can do every question on your arbitrarily chosen and constructed exam, and do so by anticipating what it is you are looking for with 100% accuracy does not mean they understand or can explain what the mathematics is about.
  • Why should our children be assigned something we also use for factory produced vegetables? Grading is an anachronistic hold-over from the Scientific Management era inserted into schooling during the 19th century.
  • Finnish kids have NO homework, but call me a believer in the idea that the Finns place less importance upon grading their children against each other. Formative assessment replacing heaps of summative assessments.
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  • Finnish national curriculum has been addended to include a multi-disciplinary requirement in each year of schooling. This will require a completely different method of assessment, there is no way to assign a single letter or numeric grade to such a task.
  • Honestly, is ranking an important outcome of education? Do we need to know who was “best” or “worst” at reading the minds of their teachers and regurgitating what those teachers want?
  • My point in this is that we seem to have lost the learning purpose, the goal of growing humans into their best selves is not central to our endeavor.
  • education needs to drop its focus upon grades as being the product of 13 years of a child’s life. Bring to schooling the joy of learning as it will go farther than the negative consequences associated with grades.
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