Curriculum

Over the years, I've been somewhat sceptical of arguments for letting teachers determine what to teach as well as how to teach it. Now, I note two aspects of my thinking. One, as with many other things, it depends on whether I consider elementary, middle, or secondary education. I am pretty sure I am not ok with leaving it up to individual teachers to determine if students have an opportunity to learn long division. On the other hand, I am concerned that required content in many high school classes is actually serving to produce poorer work.

Which is better for high school: focusing on watered-down versions of basic science college courses, or attempting to help students wrestle with the basics of the scientific challenges facing us from both technical and ethical perspectives? Of course, in the course of that wrestling, I suspect students overall would acquire at least as much long-term knowledge of basic science as they get from the current approach, but they might also acquire more interest and willingness to wrestle with public issues driven by science. I recognize the "every opinion is as good as any other" danger in such approaches, but I suspect the discussions and arguments in the classes would, nevertheless, result in more quality learning than our current approach.

You've probably heard the joke where two hikers are surprised by a bear and one takes off running. The other yells "You can't outrun a bear!" The runner replies, "I don't have to. I only have to outrun you!" My sense of possibility for teacher-designed quality work is not based on its absolute perfection. Rather, it is founded on the perception that such work would be better than the rather poor quality of learning we are getting today.

Comments

[aschoolyardblogger]

Your statement about every opinion being being as good as another caught my eye. In good classrooms I think the guiding factor should be that every opinion is worth listening to but from there the goal should be the search for truth. Truth being the best answer we can come up with given what we know at the moment. The ideas and opinions are the starting places in the search. I remember giving a group of students a problem that required the knowledge of the air mileage from Denver to Seattle. They worked on the problem in small groups and arrived at slightly differing answers. As we looked for the "truth" or the best answer we realized that groups used different resources for the mileage figure. One group depended on a boy's memory from the pilots information given on an airline flight he had taken from Denver to Seattle. Others used rulers and mileage keys on maps, others used book resources. The larger question was then left - how do we know which to use, and what are the ramifications of our choice - when does it matter? To me, these side benefits of classrooms where teachers have some room to let students explore are the worthy ones. This is where Standards make better guidelines than shallow book driven curriculums. It takes a certain type of teachers to use them though.