Curriculum defined

This section address how to find, design, evaluate, analyze, and research highly effective curriculum models. These models range from the size of multi week units to multi year textbook series. Lessons or lesson sequences less than 2 weeks in lenght are not addressed in this section.

Textbook reviews

Much of the curriculum in today's classrooms is still supported heavily by use of one or more textbooks.

Unfortunately, in depth studys of popular mathematics and science textbooks revealed that most textbooks cover too many topics and don't develop any of them well. Some include activities that either are irrelevant to learning key ideas or don't help students relate what they are doing to the underlying ideas. And similar studies of textbooks history, language arts and other disciplines has never been conducted.

Since the evaluation results were first announced in 1999 many textbook adoption committees in states and school districts around the country have used the evaluation data to make more informed decisions.

Good News

In Mathematics: There are a few excellent middle-grades mathematics textbook series (e.g. Connected Mathematics Project)

In Science: There are a few excellent science units that are underdvelopment as part of NSF instructional materials develoment efforts

Bad News

In Language Arts, History, and other disciplines: similar textbooks evaluations have not been done.

What works - exemplary curricular models

Established and Research Proven in Math:

*Connected Mathematics- (research support)

Science - Highly rated Pilots (phase I work)

*Matter and Molecules- our own pilot in 2004/05

*IQWST I- our own pilot in 2005/06

*Design In the Classroom- part of PBIS pilot we did with Barbara Hug at UIUC in 2005/06

*GEODE- our own pilot in 2005/06

*IQWST II- full year 6th grade pilot in 2006/07, and planning on phase II pilot in 2007-2010.

Science - Under Reviews

*FOSS - grade school

*STC - grade school

Models being co-designed, implemented and researched by Park View staff.

Evaluating New Materials

Designing Instructional Units

- emerging design patterns and processes

Designs

Backward Design

Designing Assessment

Possible brown bag article to read and discuss

Excerpt from a 4-page chapter in Kohn’s book: Consider the following fraction problem: Which is larger, 4/11 or 5/13? This is a question I routinely pose to parents and teachers, and very few of them (especially the math teachers) get it right because very few of them think about curriculum from the student’s point of view. The correct answer is: Who cares? To forget that this is the correct answer – and indeed, that it’s the answer to more questions than we can count – is to leave students out of the picture, to persist in teaching bare facts that don’t matter to them and therefore may not be learned by them…However, as I hope is clear by now, this doesn’t mean that we should excise fractions from the curriculum…What follows is a closer look at some ideas for changing the fundamentals of instruction…They contend that the study of virtually any topic in any discipline will benefit from raising questions about EVIDENCE (“How do we know what we know?”), POINT OF VIEW (“Whose perspective does this represent?”), CONNECTIONS (“How is this related to that?”), SUPPOSITION (“How might things have been otherwise?”), and RELEVANCE (“Why is this important?”)…To develop these habits of mind is to spend a fair amount of time in conversation, and inevitably, in disagreement with other people…Covering less in more depth, however, is only the first step toward better education. Ultimately, we want to call into question the whole idea of a curriculum to be “covered” and to think instead about ideas to be discovered.