Get the RSS feed | Elizabeth Helfant Archives

Curriculum Revision and Community Learning
by Elizabeth Helfant


It has been a busy week of curriculum revision as we continue to prepare for next year’s 1-to-1 initiative. We aren’t doing tablet training choosing instead to continue to prepare our curriculum for the changes that are approaching.  After all, it isn’t about the technology, it is about the learning and the skills that our students need to be enthusiastic, lifelong learners.

In a previous post I wrote about the categories that my school had created to describe 21st century skills and literacies that should be addressed in the curriculum. They are based on the ISTE NETs and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills but they are grouped in a way that allows our community to discuss and apply them. Every school needs to take the standards and define them in a way that makes them central to the school’s individual culture. We grouped them as follows:

Inquiry, Research, and Information Literacy

Students should understand how to identify and frame problems; find information and evaluate it for authenticity and reliability; adhere to ethical use stemming from an understanding of intellectual property and copyright; and be intelligent readers and consumers of information in a variety of mediums.

Digital Citizenship and Personal Learning Networks

Students should understand what an online identity is and how to protect it; act and interact ethically and responsibly in an online environment; and understand how to create and benefit from an online network whether it is for educational or social purposes.

Communication and Collaboration in a Global World

Students should be confident in their ability to collaborate and share effectively both internally and with the world at large; learn to communicate ideas in a variety of formats and for a variety of audiences; develop an awareness of the cultural differences and similarities in an increasingly flat world; and understand their potential to contribute in a positive way to the world at large.

Creativity, Inventive and Critical Thinking, Design

Students should develop flexibility and adaptability in their reasoning processes; understand how to use real world applications to explore and express ideas; be confident, self directed, risk-taking learners; and utilize elements of inquiry and design to produce relevant, high quality work.

In another post, I wrote about a framework for student learning declaring four questions to keep in mind when developing curriculum.

·         Is the content I am teaching essential and relevant?

·         Am I addressing the skills my students need to be successful in life?

·         Am I effectively assessing the learning that is taking place?

·         Am I fostering the spirit of inquiry that will sustain learning in my students for a lifetime?

As we set about our revision work we kept the above tenets in mind. Our goal was to develop an interdisciplinary unit that would tie to the curriculum and that would allow us to teach introductory tablet/tech skills and library research skills using content and methods that we hoped the students would find motivating and engaging. We needed a plan for both 9th and 10th grade, the two grades beginning the tablet program. Please indulge me in an overview of our plans before I get to a few key points learned in this process.

To start we suspended the trappings of a schedule in favor of designing an ideal learning experience. We listed our objectives and goals. The broad goals were to prepare them to operate in a 1-to-1 tablet environment, expose them to a solid research process, show them their learning is connected (interdisciplinary) and they bear some responsibility for it,  and set a tone of learning expectations (tablet is an academic tool that comes with responsibility.)

Having abandoned the normal framework of school, we had the ability to design an interdisciplinary learning experience with ties to the coursework they will take for the remainder of the year. We used principles of UbD and began to work. We had the broad but important goals named above. We needed an essential question for both grades to give us our starting points.

In 9th grade we settled on “What makes a civilization successful and sustainable?” This question has ties in all the 9th grade disciplines and our initial pass at creating a week long learning unit is encouraging. Summer reading will be a print and digital course pack from University Readers with excepts from Gaarder’s Sophie’s World, Diamond’s Collapse, and Hakim’s The Story of Science. When they return to school we will draw on the readings and can use the digital course pack to teach them to highlight and annotate readings online with their tablets. We decided to minimize the reading and to add a requirement that they view a chapter of the Guns, Germs, and Steel DVD and to create a webquest in WebAssign using some materials from archeology.org. We will make it simple, looking for exposure and an introduction to using WebAssign as an assessment tool. I personally like this change since it came with faculty discussion and acknowledgement that students don’t just learn from print and reading anymore and we should take advantage of any tool we have to increase their learning. Their summer work should be doable in 3-4 hours and replaces a traditional history reading selection so we think it is reasonable.

The components of the unit:

·         For homework the Friday prior to the interdisciplinary week, history teachers will have students download and install the demo game of Civilization IV. Students will play and respond to some prompts on their school blog. (We use WPMU with LDAP integration and every student has a blog.) The assignment will be introduced with conversation about responsible online behavior and blogging etiquette.

·         Basic content will be delivered in interactive lecture format using DyKnow. It will not be the student’s first exposure to DyKnow and will be a re-introduction to that interactive learning environment

·         Students will visit the Cahokia Mounds site as an example of a civilization that ceased to exist. At Cahokia, students will use cameras (still and video) to record their day. They will view the museum and walk the grounds. Faculty will make a podcast or cell phone tour to deliver information as student’s take the Cahokia walking tour. We are also attempting to put together a geocaching scavenger hunt that will have students find artifacts from other cultures bundled with questions for them to ponder.

·         A half day will be devoted to structured activities that will expose students to our databases, del.icio.us bookmarks, creative commons, and OneNote.

·         A half day will involve a rotation between three sessions - working with images in Photoshop, working with video in Adobe Premier, and answering one of the geocaching questions on the school wiki (we have a mediawiki install with LDAP authentication.)

·         Students will select a a mini-research project that will require them to connect virtually with an outside expert (we are drawing on our networks and on our alumni base for this component).

·         Students will be required to generate an informative, visual presentation using the tools of their choice. We will provide them with a list of Web 2.0 tools and applications that they can use. We aren’t sure exactly what this will look like and we aren’t totally comfortable with what feels relatively unstructured for three days. However, we want to allow for student curiosity and engagement and differentiated learning experiences. We want to embrace the concept of a community of learners, meaning students and faculty learning to create together. While there will be more structure added to the final three days, at this point we are thinking the structure will come in the form of well organized rubrics that allow for easy student and faculty assessment of individual progress. We are also suspending traditional grading for this is lieu of a pass-fail option that requires you to work until you receive a pass.

I will spare you an explanation of the 10th grade project but suffice it to say that it will have similar structure, will explore the essential question, “What is our collective responsibility for the ongoing state of the World?”, will include reading from The World Without Us and will include watching video from Life After People.

I think you always come away from productive sessions on curriculum development wondering if you selected the right readings and the right activities to make it a really good unit. You must ask “Did we incorporate elements of our internal 21st Century literacies and stay true to our framework for learning?” In this case, I also came away worried about the traditional teachers who are reluctantly but willingly getting on board and agreeing to teach this unit for a week. Would they enjoy teaching it? Would they embrace it and contribute to making it a good learning experience? Would teachers use this as an opportunity to learn with the students? As I refer back to our four literacies, I think we are staying true to them and exposing students to elements of each of them. As I look at the learning framework questions, I think we are on the right track. I know we need to tighten the assessment piece. The path we are on is new ground for us and has the potential to be transformative or to fail miserably and I’m very aware of that and at times get a little fearful.

Enter my network.  I’ve written about the importance of network before. I logged into twitter to catch the end of a conversation shown here:

 

Dmcordell reminds me that attitude and desire and collaboration are key components and we certainly have that. Datruss reminds me of the importance of designing learning experiences and not adding technology onto boring, outdated content.

Twitter pals also pointed me to JLWagner’s blog post (I love the blog byline, “To be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner. I am not a teacher, only a fellow student.”) in response to conversation with Ryan Bretag. In the post JL wagner says

“It is true that I highlighted teachers who were using Tech in their classrooms — but in actuality what is more important is that they are TEACHING with all the TOOLS that are available to them.”

There remarks give me conviction that what we are creating is a step in the right direction. We need to create learning opportunities and those opportunities need to transcend the school environment and include a larger network. Ideally those of us who have already established a network can carry our colleagues with us. We have to clearly determine what is important for students to learn and then we must take chances with curriculum. We have to be willing to be learners ourselves, elevating our capacity to learn over our capacity to teach. This unit has at its core technology acquisition as a goal and yet the technology is secondary to the creation of a learning experience/environment for everyone involved. The technology is merely a component or tool that if adequately employed can greatly enhance our students’ and our own capacity to learn. 

In a world so full of information and resources, should we and how can we transform our curriculum into a series of educational experiences that meets the needs and engages each student learner?

About Elizabeth

Elizabeth Helfant is the Upper School Coordinator of Instructional Technology at Mary Institute Country Day School, a JK-12 institution embarking on a 1:1 adventure. using Tablet PCs and DyKnow.