Curriculum Design-Task 1

I am not sure that any one of the curriculum ideas are a "stand alone" fix. I believe that all of the ideas would be best put to use buy using them all together and integrating them with each other as much as possible.

Wraga believes in having a common goal for all students. We are really working towards that goal this year in my school with our writing workshops. This summer we spent a lot of time in PD learning how kids respond to how they are assessed in writing. One teacher may grade the content, and another may grade the grammar. We needed to come together as a district and decide how we would assess student writing. If the assignment calls for them to tell as much as they know about phases of the moon, and they can convey that information perfectly, then we are striving as a district to not take off for punctuation and capitilization. The student's goal is to master the phases of the moon, and if they meet that goal, they begin to feel defeated when they could possibly fail the paper due to technical errors. We have started a writing workshop where we are trying to learn to work on this very thing; just grading them on what they are asked to do. We are implementing mini lessons to work on the common grammatical errors we see in their writing that won't lower their score on curriculum. I think this is going to be very successful.

Wiggins idea is to make students responsible for their learning and getting into the deeper questioning. Our district is working on this two fold. First we have started a program called ThoughtfulEd. This program is supposed to give students questions to discuss that lead to higher learning, instead of always using those depth of knowledge 1 and 2 questions that are so easy to get stuck using. We are also working on getting our students to self assess their work. This helps them see how they can improve, gives them the tools to do it, and takes the responsibility off the teacher, and puts it on the student where it should be. We are only beginning the self assessment, and I have already seen results with students as young as 7. They are beginning to really understand what they will be graded on, and how they will be graded. They are beginning to take responsibility for getting that "4" on the open response, and if they don't get it, they are beginning to understand how they can improve to get it next time. I believe that once the student takes an interest in their own education, 90 percent of the battle is won.

The converstaional, connected curriculum that Applebee talks about is one that I believe we are attempting in the ThoughtfulEd program I discussed earlier. Getting them to go deeper, and find the connections to real life. If they can find a meaning for what they are learning in life, they are much more likely to make a deep connection and a true understanding. I believe this one might be the most difficult to accomplish. Maybe not with the proper training, but I don't feel I know quite enough about how to implement this type of curriculum without more training, other than with the program I have already spoke about. I am also unsure how to keep them on topic.

I think anytime that we can use multiple ideas in different ways to bring learning to a deeper level and have students make that connection, we hit a home run. I do believe that there are pieces of all of these ideas in my classsroom, and I owe that to my district for always being on the lookout for things that will make our students the best that they can be.