Curriculum 21: Or how you should stop worrying and learn to love technological innovation in education.

Heidi Hayes Jacobs

I was inspired by a Christmas present to myself, Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World by Heidi Hayes Jacobs.  I ran across the title while doing some shopping on Amazon and found her ideas and writing style instantly engrossing.  Her work with curriculum innovation and the Common Core State Standards is doing a lot to bring the United States’ education system out of the 1800’s and into the 2000’s.  A particularly enjoy how she has declared war on the #2 pencil.

The principal of our local K-8 worked with our state Representative to secure a grant which funded Apple iTouches for every student from the 2nd grade up.  The iTouch's were loaded with educational content organized and synchronized by their classroom teachers, they have been allowed to use them at school, and even take them home, effectively stretching the school day into the evening by sometimes several hours.  This grant and the technology itself was considered very controversial by many who saw "gadgets" replacing "traditional" book learning.

I have heard a lot about “traditional” skills and knowledge but since the threat of the end of the Mayan calendar has now passed, I’m hoping that more people will embrace the idea that our children’s future is uncertain.  I’m hoping that they will stop doing them a disservice by hobbling them, ensuring that they will be unable to compete in the Global Market with some kid in India who lives in a cardboard box but knows how to create a podcast.  Tony Wagner’s The GlobalAchievement Gap does a fair job of explaining how our faith in The Three “R’s” is rendering us obsolete.

I would like to make it very plain that my audience here is not a community of educators.  They’ve heard all of this.  My audience here is parents.  Mom and Dad, Auntie, Uncle, Grandma, Grandpa, Foster whatever…  Whoever out there who is responsible for feeding and clothing a child is also responsible for educating them.

With the slow but inevitable adoption of the Common Core State Standards in Alaska, it is easier than ever for parents to understand the Standards that their children are being held to.  Heck!  There's even an app for it!  Parents can also explore ways to integrate technology and skills into their home life by exploring the intersection of Common Core and Curriculum 21.

What are the schools for, you ask?  The schools are there to do what YOU tell them to do.  Look around at successful schools and school districts.  They are filled with children whose parents that are the squeaky wheels.  The “helicopter parents” who advocate, oversee, and, basically, make the lives of the principals, superintendents, and school board members a living hell if the educational needs of their children are not met.

I am the best/worst sort of "helicopter parent."

While an overabundance of "screen time" can certainly do a child a disservice in some ways, engaging with the myriad of enriching handheld and online apps is far more beneficial for a child than "traditional" paper and pencil worksheets and textbooks.  At one point, textbooks were innovative educational technology and they are still very often a subject of controversy.  Even writing was, at one point, considered a hindrance to authentic learning!  By none other than the great-grandfather of education, Socrates, himself!

Socrates felt that writing ruined a student's ability to memorize information.  Because students could look things up they had access to a lot of information without really knowing anything.  Sound familiar?

Backwards Design

When my daughter, Colleen, is 25 she will email me a picture of herself on a beach South of Barcelona.  She will be pointing at a pod of dolphins splashing in the sandy shallows of the brilliant blue Mediterranean.  The email will also include a link to a news article about her boss at some European Union summit.  There will be a snapshot of two official-looking older people shaking hands and smiling at the camera.  Colleen will be in the background, smartly dressed and holding a briefcase.  She will be staring at the gilded wainscoting with her mouth slightly open.  I will laugh at the picture.  I will also be slightly annoyed that she won't make it home for Christmas.

My three children; Colleen 14, Morgan 4, & Quinn almost 2

Colleen is currently fourteen years old and a freshman in highschool.  I have 10 ½ years to get her from our little town in Alaska to where I want to see her when she’s 25.  3 ½ really as there won't be a whole lot I can do to influence her decisions after she graduates from high school.  Other than hope that everything I've taught her has sunk in.

In education this idea of getting your kids where you want to see them is called “backwards design.”  Rather than plugging along at the curriculum, doing what you think you ought to be doing, then testing on the material that you've covered, you decide your objective first.  What do you want your kids to know or, more importantly, what do you want your kids to be able to do? After you've decided your objective, you decide how you will assess or test whether or not your kids can do what you want them to do.  Then you figure out how to get them to that point.

Pile of building materials that randomly & holistically morphed into a 5 room, 32x20, 2-story addition to our home.  Not.

Think about this in terms of building a house.  One does not start with a pile of materials and begin randomly hammering & sawing, hoping for the best.  If that technique is used, one can imagine that a significant amount of time would be spent fixing problems that you, yourself created through lack of foresight.  Believe me, I’m in the process of building a house, I know.  The smart (and usual) way to go about constructing something is to plan first, then draw up your materials list, then begin, using your plans, measuring twice before cutting.

Throughout my teaching residency at a local high school, I followed the backwards design rule religiously.  I'm became a whiz at looking up national, state, Common Core, cultural, and district standards to figure out how to decide what my kids needed to do/know.  Then I dug through the internet and my methods text to decide how they could prove to me that I had been successful in my teaching.  Only then did I design the series of lessons/steps to get us to where we needed to be by the end of the unit.

Keeping in mind that most educators have invested the same amount of time and money into their own education as your average doctor or lawyer and, therefore, have some level of expertise in their field which should be acknowledged if not respected; parents, ultimately, know what is best for their kids

Backwards design works as well in parenting as it does in teaching.  Ask yourself, “Where do I want my kid to be in 10 years, 20, 30?”  “How do I want them to live?”  “What opportunities do I want them to have?”  Of COURSE you can’t plan your kids’ life out to the last detail but using the “they will rebel and do what they want anyway” line is something of a cop-out.

I know it’s hard.  Who can see the future?  But aside from being good, moral, compassionate individuals, your kids are going to need to know a lot more than how to tie their shoes.  So get to it.

Free to Learn

My middle daughter's fifth birthday is coming up in a few days. I was at the local toy shop, Timeless Toys, and the clerk admired my choice in gifts. She said that she and her husband, both biologists, hoped that their two young sons became interested in science as they grew older. I told her that her children would be what she wanted them to be as long as they learned to love it when they were young. Which is why I was buying a microscope for my five-year-old daughter to "play" with.

Peter Gray's work in Free To Learn combines the hard sciences of child growth and development, psychology, learning & cognition, with the softer concepts found in sociology and anthropology to explain and promote a style of teaching that suits the needs of every child naturally.  While many of the concepts are shocking and difficult to grasp for those of us brought up in a post-industrial, public school world, they make a simple sense when viewed from a biological perspective.

While I feel comfortable with a more structured teaching and learning environment as do, I believe, many parents and children; many aspects of Gray's work have been very successful for my homeschooled adolescent.

I recommend this book to parents and educators who care about helping children learn to love the world.
For further reference, watch the documentary film, Free To Learn: A Radical Experiment in Education.