by Carol Lacerenza-Bjork, National Re:Learning Faculty memberAt West Hill High School in Stamford, Connecticut, English teacher Carol Lacerenza-Bjork and her ninth-grade students developed a curriculum that would achieve their objectives by giving more attention to fewer required texts. Here is her account of how that year-long course took shape, as they planned backwards from the outcomes they aimed for: DEFINING
Of course, intellectual learning includes the amassing and retention of information. But information is an undigested burden unless it is understood . . . . And understanding, comprehension, means that the various parts of the information acquired are grasped in their relations to one another result that is attained only when acquisition is accompanied by constant reflection upon the meaning
Cutting things out of the overcrowded curriculum presents our only chance for getting students to go deeper, think harder, push past complacency to the habits of mind Essential schools hold dear. But what goes and what stays? And who decides? PRETTY MUCH EVERYBODY agrees: “Less Is More” is the toughest of the Coalition’s Nine Common Principles to explain and to
Central Park East Secondary School in New York uses these overarching questions to focus attention on habits of mind in every class and every subject: From whose viewpoint are we seeing or reading or hearing? From what angle or perspective? How do we know when we know? What’s the evidence, and how reliable is it? How are things, events, or
In his 1992 book Smart Schools: From training memories to Educating Minds, David Perkins suggests reorganizing the curriculum around “generative topics” that provoke what he calls “understanding performances” which not only demonstrate a student’s understanding but also advance it by encompassing new situations. With his Harvard University colleagues Howard Gardner and Vito Perrone, he devised several standards for such topics:
From the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics’ Standards Changes in Content and Emphases in Grades 9-12 Topics to Receive Increased Attention ALGEBRA The use of real-world problems to motivate and apply theory The use of computer utilities to develop conceptual understanding Computer-based methods such as successive approximations and graphing utilities for solving equations and inequalities The structure of number
At the heart of good thinking, David Perkins suggests in his 1992 book Smart Schools, is the “thinking disposition” an inclination to learn that encompasses the abilities or “know-how” we want children to acquire. Good teachers model, cultivate, point out, and reward these dispositions, he says, in everything from classroom discussions to assessment activities. Perkins and his colleagues Eileen Jay
The most effective way to put less is more into practice, a math team at Heathwood hall Episcopal school in Columbia south Carolina decided, was to decide together what should go into the mathematics portfolios of their algebra and geometry students. Using the guidelines of the National council of Teachers of Mathematics, Daniel Venebles, Amelia Havilnad, Allison Venables and Carlo
As part of your final exhibition you must show yourself and us that you can do the following from memory: Recite a poem or song or story that is special to your family or community Draw a map of the world, freehand(conventional Mercator projection) and be prepared to place properly on your map at least 12 of 15 members of
The art of remembering is the art of thinking; . . . when we wish to fix a new thing in either our own mind or a pupil’s, our conscious effort should not be so much to impress and retain it as to connect it with something else already there. The connecting is the thinking; and if we attend clearly