Map Of Your Head, by Daniel Conway
I found Gary Hayes and Laurel Papworth’s Social Media Campaign image a few days ago via Steven Anderson’s (@web20classroom) Blogging About The Web 2.0 Connected Classroom. It broadened my thinking about the curriculum map due to my head of school in September. I work at a middle school that strives to differentiate instruction by content, process, product, and time in hopes of re-engaging struggling students with a love of learning before high school. Any one, traditional curriculum map I create will, by necessity, be obsolete before I begin writing it. My state standards are already written; my description of our class structure is done; our coaches and experts have been recruited (including members of the Virginia Experiment and Music Resource Center); we’ve drafted rubrics collaboratively; now we need students and time for the model to take hold. I’ve been struggling with writing a traditional curriculum map because I don’t know what it will add to our work. Enter the image.
After reading Steven’s post, I started thinking about a curriculm map as a picture of a classroom’s learning system. Thinking about virtual charter schools, authentic engagement with the global community, and the needs of our students, I put together a picture of the “how” instead of the “what.” I’m not sure it’s “right,” but it represents how I hope our class will learn.
To move past teaching for the test, we’ll need to map past the test, as well. Maybe one way to do that is to map systems in place of content, or to separate content (the plug-in or add-on) from the learning model (the program).
Please take the curriculum map below to pieces, question it, and help me figure out how to better articulate the model of learning. Administrators, parents, students, and tax-payers, what else would you want to see from a teacher’s curriculum map? Teachers, what else would you include?
A curriculum map of "how" instead of "what"
Comments 4
To me, ‘collecting new information’ and ‘publishing new work’ are black boxes. Publishing is a rather creative process which takes a few core skills (i.e. skills that empower writing). The process of collecting is the most important and most difficult part for me. I currently try to develop a good way of collecting information, own thoughts and notes on literature in a neat way, imitating what a zettelkasten does (i.e. German for box of index cards which, when used long enough, makes generation of ideas possible by combining existing notes in a seemingly unrelated manner; a zettelkasten creates and reveals relationships we may never have thought of).
In my opinion, a working structure is key to a successful collection process. Most people at University just store their project-related files in a folder, ponder the information, then they write. Eventually, the folder is deleted. Often times not even the paper written is saved for later use or reference.
Probably you could elaborate on collecting and managing information further. I think there’s lots of room for improvement in people’s and pupil’s skills.
Posted 09 Oct 2009 at 2:24 am ¶I agree; shortly we will have to figure out how best to collect and share the resources we find for a documentary project. Services like Edmodo are good in the present, but old links tend to get lost in the timeline. Some combination of physical and electronic portfolios maintained by individuals and the class as a whole will need to be developed and refined. Maybe an annotated bibliography on the class wiki? I’ll keep thinking and making note of what the students’ find most useful. Thanks for the comment, Christian! (Much of my wife’s disseration was about ludic, re-combinant mechanisms for reinterpreting information in light of new connections, and she loves the German language, so I’ll quiz her about zettelkasten tonight.)
Posted 09 Oct 2009 at 9:47 am ¶You may know tools for bibliography maintenance which rely on the BibTeX format, which is most useful when combined with LaTeX typesetting/writing. A very nice and popular freeware program to manage BibTeX is JabRef (or BibDesk for Mac Computers). I don’t know if this is of any help to you since I know nothing about your class wiki but I guess a proprietary format like BibTeX doesn’t cooperate well with the open structure of a wiki, whatever it’s used for in the end. For my private and student writing and reading I learned to love both LaTeX and BibTeX as they’re open, plain-text formats. As I said, I know not a thing about your work in detail, so I better wait for more specific information before I just keep on ranting about random stuff
I’d love to hear more about your wife’s dissertation, though. Is it available online? I tend to find not a thing of help when in search for information about knowledge management.
Posted 11 Oct 2009 at 2:16 pm ¶I’m catching up on comments – thank you for your patience!
My wife’s reseach can be found at http://nowviskie.org/research/.
Best,
Posted 28 Oct 2009 at 12:08 pm ¶C
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