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Originally Posted by para transit fellow
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A lot of the changes she's asking for in that letter have already been made or are being practiced on a wide scale. I know some teachers don't embrace new styles of learning very readily but some of the things she's saying just don't make sense to me.
1. Learning should be more flexible, no more worksheets - I don't know when the last time was that I saw a worksheet - learning today is based around overarching challenging questions, getting students to think about real-world issues and tie curriculum concepts to their lives. I've spent a significant amount of time in a lot of various styles of classrooms over the past year and haven't seen many worksheets except maybe the occasional math problem.
2. Should the curriculum be about how much information we can fill our heads with? No, with all due respect - has this girl read the curriculum? The curriculum is about concepts, skills, attitudes, ways of thinking, not really about information.
Do you have to know the periodic table by heart? No, can you show me in the curriculum where it says you do?
3. Won't need calculus and no idea why you learn Shakespeare? Calculus is an option - a lot of people do want to take it. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and so did a lot of my classmates. It develops problem-solving ability and involves abstract thinking which is valued by a lot of employers in a variety of different fields.
Shakespeare was a revolutionary playwright who contributed significantly to Western thought, and yes looking at a Shakespearean play in English 20-1 and 30-1 is a requirement as of now but that's about to change with the new curriculum. Shakespeare is widely used because a lot of his work has been adapted into modern feature films and also features poetry which are also parts of the English curriculum (for now), so it allows teachers to 'kill two birds with one stone' so to speak. If you read the curriculum though you would recognize that it's not really about Shakespeare, it's about what his plays say about life, society, love, etc.,
Physical Education is definitely moving away from "play dodgeball for an hour" to more of an actual education about the body. Seriously, read the phys ed program of study, very little of it has to do with actually playing games. It mostly has to do with active and healthy living, nutrition and physical activity - things that are certainly valuable to you as a human being.
5. more tied to experiences - This is definitely the way the curriculum has gone recently and will continue to go in the future, again read the curriculum, this is ALL it is about, getting students to engage in a meaningful way and challenge them to think about concepts in relation to their own lives. Some teachers are able to capture this more effectively than others, obviously. But I agree with her that learning has to be linked to the life of the student or it is meaningless.
6/7. assessment needs to change - I agree, and it is changing. High-stakes testing is on the way out, ongoing formative assessment is on the way in. I have a lot of opinions on testing but one thing I know for sure is having a student write a test and then giving them a percentage grade a few weeks later is not valuable. An ongoing large project with frequent feedback and opportunities for the student to improve their work and get something valuable out of it is likely what we will see once diploma exams have gone away.
8/9. Regarding the curriculum being complex, I don't know what's complex about it. It's pretty simple, really. Just try reading it.
