Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Curriculum

The area that teachers are tied closest to is curriculum. This is also the most difficult paradigm shift for teachers. George Siemens wrote something that reinforced for me the challenges that we, and particularly teachers, face as we try to redefine education and work our way through these paradigm shifts.

Content today is essentially a stream - we don’t commit it to memory so much as we interact with it to see what it holds for temporary understanding, and then we move on to the next innovation or emerging research.

If this is true about content today, then our curriculum and our assessments need to respond to that. Locating 50 states and their capitals on a map has little relevancy (it probably never did). So what is important? What do we need to understand to help us make this shift in understanding what curriculum entails? We need to dip into that stream of content, be able to evaluate the relevance of that information, and than do something creative or innovative, and then move on, repeating the process. We do seem to spend our precious time with students, having them commit much of that content to memory and falling short of that creativity and innovation piece. Essentially, we are leaving behind any real thinking. And it’s hard for teachers who love their content, to give in to the fact that it is no longer important to memorize all the tidbits of that which they love so much. It’s not the content, it’s what you do with the content. Curriculum needs to change and reflect that. We need to change our paradigm.

Posted by Randy on 05/09 at 10:22 PM
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