Subject: Curriculum - sustainability (Garg

Posted by John Heinbokel on 12/12/2005
In Reply To:Curriculum - sustainability (Garg Posted by Amit Garg on 12/10/2005

Message:

A friend and colleague from Minnesota, Ralph Brauer (tsc@mtn.org), sent this to me as a personal note. In his last paragraph he gives permission to send this on, so, given the importance of his points and the push they provide for moving forward, I am thrilled to do so.



Ralph should be familiar to many on this List. He was Executive Director of the Transforming Schools Consortium and “discovered” and was infected by SD in that context. We (Jeff Potash and I, here at CIESD) had the pleasure to work with him on a very challenging project on school leadership under the auspices of the State of Minnesota. That work is described on our website (http://www.ciesd.org/case-studies/education/minnesota.shtml), in a recent CLExchange Newsletter (http://www.clexchange.org/ftp/newsletter/CLEx13.1.pdf), and in a feature article in The School Administrator (http://www.aasa.org/publications/saarticledetail.cfm?ItemNumber=1088&snItemNumber=950&tnItemNumber=951). Thanks for sharing this, Ralph. And yes, I do intend to keep you in this conversation as/when it moves forward.



John





Been following your discussion on the list serve, although the formatting makes it interesting (received lots of ALFSDH;WDFGH TODAY). I don’t know if I am the educator you cited in your latest re the value of SD for math [yes, he was! – john h], but if not I will lend my support to that. A few points:



1) NO innovation will succeed without the support of the Board and the Superintendent



2) Given NCLB unfortunately any innovation must promise to raise test scores.



3) Funding for most nontraditional curricular efforts is nonexistent.



4) Math skills in this country are appalling and if we don't get on the ball we will find all our nuclear power plants being operated by either the likes of Homer Simpson or foreign mercenaries. Someone quoted to me (although I cannot instantly verify this) that most of the advanced degrees in math, engineering, and computer science are now going to foreign students. India is now the largest supplier of Internet based services. We could go on and on-- much of it a reiteration of Thomas Friedman's excellent book.



5) There does seem to be a general consensus that whatever we are doing in math is not working. We may not be where we were in the 1960s when there was a literal panic about math skills, but we are getting close.

We lack a sputnik scare to fuel the fire. Ditto for science (when over half the country believes in so-called intelligent design you begin to wonder about both our intelligence and our design).



6) The bottom line is that I think that SD can add immeasurably to our math and science education. Curiously both reformers and "back to the basics" types seems to agree that the math curriculum as presently designed does not teach students how to think quantitatively (the old chestnut about students not being able to make change). SD offers not merely what Bill Norris used to call a two-fer but a three-fer: it teaches folks quantitative thinking, it teaches problem solving, and it teaches the systemic nature of problems When we worked with administrators a key point we wanted them to see is that change is not linear. .



7) I say GO FOR IT. I think the proposal that would attract the most attention would be one that one somehow combine math and science and would do it on an elementary grade level--not hs. Why do I say elementary--because folks have finally accepted the notion that the earlier we reach kids, the better. Second, elementary bureaucracies are much easier to negotiate. Third, the curriculum is easier to "manipulate." Four, most elementary teachers are by nature generalists and I think would take easier to SD. What you are looking for is a bunch of Jim Minerich's [an elementary teacher with whom we worked on he MN project – john h].



8. Packaging this: take some of you existing SD types to serve as mentors (the TSC resource sharing model would work nice here as a replication model). I wish I still had my tie-ins with NSBA, etc. but what you need is one national high visibility partner. Would MIT or George Richardson do it? Third, pick A FEW pilot sites to try this out in areas that are convenient to you, where you may know some of the folks involved, etc. Even better use existing SD types to mentor colleagues in their own schools.



9. The outcome of this has to be a specific curriculum. My understanding is you had started along such lines at the Commons School. This needs to be something that can scale up fast.



10. You need to have a very good independent evaluator--perhaps Kyla [a collaborator on the MinSim project at the U or MN – john h] could/would do it. Some of your SD contacts like Linda Booth Sweeney may also know folks. Designing the evaluation instrument will not be easy. In essence my hypothesis at this point is based on my own and other's experiences with SD. We know it will be a compounding curve and that the degree and speed of the compounding depends on exogenous variables which I don't think we yet properly understand. Why does Jane get it faster than Johnny? How can the curriculum be designed to accommodate both? (Here my biases towards individualized learning and constructivism show). If the evaluation "output" is a linear graph showing "x" amount of improvement you will have defeated the purpose of the entire effort--and missed a golden opportunity to better understand how to better teach SD.



That's my two cents. Feel free to add it to the discussion if you feel it will help move things further along for you. Let me know when and where I can be of help.