The 10th grade Humanities curriculum has largely been organized around four central texts since at least the time I came to the level four years ago. We've varied the order, but we have always studied the following: The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, The Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra, and The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. It's been a long time since we've been a school that hands a new teacher a pile of books and invites him to close the door and teach however s/he wants to (and I'm grateful for that), but we haven't always had a clearly articulated curriculum. For the last four years, as a level, we've worked to identify a common set of learning targets around those central texts.
We're at a point, though, where we're beginning a major curricular evolution. In June of this year, the level started to consider the idea of "to what end?" for our curriculum. And we landed on a connecting thread as we considered the four central texts: social justice. We defined these driving essential questions: What defines a just society? What creates injustice in societies? What makes it difficult to perceive injustice? What is the role of the individual in responding to injustice?
We're hoping that by spending a year working with students on these questions, we'll foster the following 21st Century Learning Outcomes: Intercultural knowledge and competence, ethical reasoning and action, personal and social responsibility, and civic knowledge and engagement.
So far, nothing I've written has been a major evolution. The fact that all of these pieces now live on a piece of paper somewhere that shows how they are all connected is really encouraging. The paper itself represents hours and hours of conversation with colleagues and great effort to honor the work that has already been done. These ideas have floated for a few years, and having them nailed down on a piece of paper (to the extent that anything is fixed on a piece of paper) is great thing, though.
The major evolution to the curriculum is the addition of a layer of thinking: key critical thinking understandings. The term "critical thinking" gets thrown around quite a bit, but this is a specific kind of critical thinking. We plan to directly teach our students about how their brains work and to challenge them to slow their thinking down as they wrestle with the big ideas of our curriculum. Think language like "system 1 and system 2" (Kahneman), fundamental attribution error, narrative fallacy, truthiness, illusion of knowledge, confirmation bias, familiarity effect, availability effect, rationalizing, and motivated reasoning. Kids will be thinking about their own thinking as we study the central texts. We don't just want our students to nod their head to Adichie's TED Talk "Danger of a Single Story," we want our students to be able to slow down their thinking, explain why we ALL create single stories, and consider how to recognize their own "single stories."
Most of the teachers at my level have been studying texts that teach us to think about thinking: Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow or David McRaney's You Are Not So Smart among many other sources. Some of us have had the opportunity to sit in a seminar with a colleague who has developed her own expertise in this area and in thinking about how it applies to our work with students. And this fall, we'll all be studying this together all over again as we work to deliver this to our students.
Posts to come (things I'm thinking about) will be about how this work is going from a curricular design level and at a classroom delivery level. I imagine, too, that I'll be doing a lot of thinking about how to facilitate conversations among the colleagues at my level as I'm the curriculum team leader for the tenth grade, and I spend a lot of time trying to create meetings that support others in their work. Plus, there are other components to the curriculum that I haven't mentioned here--the grading of course goals, creation of assessments, creation of common assessments (the Writing Program). And then there's my work around the teaching of reading. I think a lot about how to help my students be better readers. I'll work some of that out here.
We're hoping that by spending a year working with students on these questions, we'll foster the following 21st Century Learning Outcomes: Intercultural knowledge and competence, ethical reasoning and action, personal and social responsibility, and civic knowledge and engagement.
So far, nothing I've written has been a major evolution. The fact that all of these pieces now live on a piece of paper somewhere that shows how they are all connected is really encouraging. The paper itself represents hours and hours of conversation with colleagues and great effort to honor the work that has already been done. These ideas have floated for a few years, and having them nailed down on a piece of paper (to the extent that anything is fixed on a piece of paper) is great thing, though.
The major evolution to the curriculum is the addition of a layer of thinking: key critical thinking understandings. The term "critical thinking" gets thrown around quite a bit, but this is a specific kind of critical thinking. We plan to directly teach our students about how their brains work and to challenge them to slow their thinking down as they wrestle with the big ideas of our curriculum. Think language like "system 1 and system 2" (Kahneman), fundamental attribution error, narrative fallacy, truthiness, illusion of knowledge, confirmation bias, familiarity effect, availability effect, rationalizing, and motivated reasoning. Kids will be thinking about their own thinking as we study the central texts. We don't just want our students to nod their head to Adichie's TED Talk "Danger of a Single Story," we want our students to be able to slow down their thinking, explain why we ALL create single stories, and consider how to recognize their own "single stories."
Most of the teachers at my level have been studying texts that teach us to think about thinking: Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow or David McRaney's You Are Not So Smart among many other sources. Some of us have had the opportunity to sit in a seminar with a colleague who has developed her own expertise in this area and in thinking about how it applies to our work with students. And this fall, we'll all be studying this together all over again as we work to deliver this to our students.
Posts to come (things I'm thinking about) will be about how this work is going from a curricular design level and at a classroom delivery level. I imagine, too, that I'll be doing a lot of thinking about how to facilitate conversations among the colleagues at my level as I'm the curriculum team leader for the tenth grade, and I spend a lot of time trying to create meetings that support others in their work. Plus, there are other components to the curriculum that I haven't mentioned here--the grading of course goals, creation of assessments, creation of common assessments (the Writing Program). And then there's my work around the teaching of reading. I think a lot about how to help my students be better readers. I'll work some of that out here.
