Wiggins and McTighe in Schooling by Design state, "For it to be a curriculum...it would have to be a plan for achieving performance purposes, for specifying how learners are to accomplish important understanding - related tasks with content, not just a plan for teaching content. (p37)" So, is our curriculum in social studies asking students to "do" the discipline or just learn the content.
A challenge we are facing is we have achieved Stage I but do not require Stage II which would add the performance task into the curriculum - the "doing the discipline" piece. Pages 49 - 51 include an excellent example of a discipline based curriculum from New Jersey. Another challenge - the curriculum may be based on the competencies of the discipline but it may not be implemented based on the competencies.
The ideas for action at the end of the chapter provide some great strategies that could easily be accomplished in our schools (of course - time and talent are needed to create them) - appropriate diagnostic assessments (pre-tests and on-going feedback), cornerstone (peer reviewed) assessment tasks, recurring tasks and rubrics, and "gap" check (of course the key is to have the assessment tasks we need to collect the data for monitoring the intended, implemented and attained curriculum).
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment