Platform – Setting Curriculum Standards: The Classroom Culture

The curriculum needs to be forward leaning. Our students will spend most of their careers in a future we cannot predict. It has often been said that an educated person is not someone who knows everything but someone who knows how to learn anything. Too much emphasis is placed on teaching to the STARR to the detriment of the academic skills they will need in their lives.

  • Curiosity about how and why things happen
  • The joy of reading
  • Mastery of what helps them learn faster and retain longer
    • Does writing the note help them or are they better hearing the notes?
    • Does explaining it to others help?
  • Listening skills
  • How to work in teams.

These are not lessons, in themselves, but come through in the classroom culture.

Platform – Setting Curriculum Standards: Literacy

Students should develop a variety of types of literacy. Every topic in the curriculum can be used to reinforce these literacies. The grater the mastery of these literacies the richer the experience of each curriculum topic.

  • Reading, understanding and retention in one or more languages. One of which is English.
  • Hearing, understanding and retention in one or more languages. One of which is English.
  • Writing, in one or more languages. One of which is English.
    • The traditional writing of essays and theme papers.
    • Writing as art, as poetry, as fiction, as non-fiction
    • How to communicate by email, in a letter.
    • Writing a press release, a script for a reporter, a script for a news anchor
    • Writing a script for a skit, a play, a video
  • Visual and Audio Communications
    • Preparing Slide Decks with words and images
    • Instant messaging with hashtags, emojis and abbreviations
    • Videos for entertainment, reporting, as art.
    • Soundtracks or spoken words and music as communications, as reporting, as art
  • Numerical Literacy
    • How to summarize a collection of data
    • How to visualize a collection of data
    • How to interpret a collection of data.
      • Are there trends?
      • What can we learn from a visualization?
  • Computer Literacy
    • Making Web Pages, Web site, Blog, Shopping
    • How do things work?
      • Browser
      • Cell phone
      • Smart Phone
      • Digital Camera
    • What is underneath?
      • Communications and protocols
      • Algorithms
      • Hardware

Platform – Setting Curriculum Standards: Curriculum Connections

The material presented in the curriculum should be

  • Accurate – based upon the best information from experts in the topic.
    • Students should learn how to determine accuracy.
    • Students should learn how to evaluate an expert.
  • Fact based
    • Students should learn how to check facts
  • Clearly identify opinion and present multiple opinions

Students forming own opinion.

Next Steps…

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