To help formalize a process for negotiating curriculum I am going to pitch project-based units to students.
Each pitch will have four pieces.
The Vision: The first part of the pitch will be a presentation of my vision for a unit, including its goals and an overview of the steps or activities involved in the unit. Each [...]
After looking back at previous posts about community engagement, curriculum, teaching, and grading and assessment, I want to publish a short to do list for myself this year as a way of holding myself accountable for continued change in my classroom practice. To complement the list, I’ll maintain a Google Doc score card shared with [...]
This week I read around the Washington Post’s “Top Secret America” portal. You can read about its methodology and see the project’s credits here.
I started with this article: “National Security Inc.” On page 10, the article describes the work of Ken Pohill, an employee of General Dynamics, a defense contractor serving multiple roles in the [...]
As I work on this year’s curriculum map, I’m trying to set up a learning space bounded by the minimum number of teacher-imposed, useful constraints necessary to promote student-directed democracy, community, and learning.
My map this year will look more course-specific than last year’s meta-map, which I think is still a useful model for project-based work. [...]
Mary Beth Hertz (@mbteach) wrote here about #ISTE10’s “Dissecting the 21st Century Teacher” panel. I commented on a few of the lines that caught my attention regarding curriculum and a teacher’s role in maintaining and delivering content. I’m torn there. There’s so much discoverable content maintained out there that it’s useful for a teacher [...]
I do seem to remember a process where you people ask me questions and I give you answers, and then I ask you questions and you give me answers, and that’s the way we find out things. I think I read that in a manual somewhere.
-Dr. Heywood Floyd,
My wife, Bethany Nowviskie (@nowviskie), has posted on the University of California’s moves to boycott Nature Publishing Group. Essentially, the publishing group takes the work of professors – authors and peer reviewers – and then sells subscriptions back to the professors’ institutions at exorbitant rates that force further cuts in library systems already savaged by [...]
[An original contribution to Hacking the Academy.]
The academy should hack itself to transform public education. Here’s how:
1. Stop complaining about public education.
Since Sputnik, American schools have been anxiety-driven to produce “college-ready” students. Standardized testing, A Nation at Risk, the No Child Left Behind act, the Race to the Top Initiative, and the upcoming Elementary [...]
Deven Black, who blogs at Education on the Plate and tweets as @spedteacher, very kindly mentioned me in a post on “10 + 1 [blogs] Not To Miss.” Deven noted that while we often disagree (perhaps especially on charters, with which we’ve had vastly different experiences), we share common beliefs about the need to see [...]
So, we’re about to hit our testing window. I don’t have a lot of innovative testing ideas to share, though our school is doing some awesome work to make students feel comfortable and cared for during their three-week ordeal. We’re also going to reinvent our daily schedule after the tests to delve school-wide into what [...]
Chad teaches humanities at a charter school and blogs on reforming classroom practice and democratic education.
