Curriculum Questions

Which of these make sense to you?

• Work on a project for 43 minutes, scramble to put it away, and move to a different room to start another project (or listen to someone else talk about a totally different topic)...and continue to do that all day.

• Work with up to 10 different experts each and every day one 10 different topics...yet, these experts never (or rarely) talk to each other about the things they know in common.

• Not have access to the tools you need to do the job...if you are building something, you don't have a hammer, saw, and measures. If you are writing something, you may have a pencil, but you don't have a computer.

You get the picture. Schools have many regularities—the way they are organized...six hours each day with a series of random contacts between teachers and students. Connections among classes are the exception rather than the rule (and this is true at the elementary school more and more...just as it always has been at the middle and high school levels).

Other regularities include a school year of approximately nine months and an extended summer break.

Several questions for you to think about?
√ Do these common expectations or commonly accepted ways of "doing school" assist learning or do they hinder learning? Are there better ways to organize schools...at any level?

√ In most schools, the curriculum is organized around separate subjects (and again...more and more so since NCLB...but that is another story!).

√ If someone appointed you principal of the day, what would you do about some of the school regularities we all grew up with and know so well?

Is your school regular?