Lessons Learned

I recently posted How Progressive is Your School? to highlight our school’s effort to measure just how progressive we are. The discussion centered upon the article by Alfie Cohen and the 8 values (Intrinsic Motivation, Social Justice, Collaboration, Whole Child, Community, Deep Understanding, Active Learning & Taking Kids Seriously) that encompass being more progressive in how we “do” school. I am now doing a series of posts about our learning community’s ideas about each value. We are now discussing one value per month and looking at ways to follow through in making the value even more a part of our culture at HIS.

• One room school house
• Where are we in our interdisciplinary efforts?
• Learning how to collaborate, learning to work and play together. Teach cooperative learning skills as part of 21st century skill set.
• How do we build a truly democratic school?
• What role does the Student Representative Council play in our community decision-making?
• How effective is group work in our classrooms? Which kinds of group projects more effective?
• Which Web 2.0 tools meet our collaboration needs?
• While we have the structure and culture for collaboration, how well are we doing?, How can we measure our efforts?
• How to expand the collaboration to our immediate and world community?
• Role of administration in all aspects of collaboration?
• Our culture supports mixing of seniors with younger students.
• Continue to develop older students as peer leaders with attentive listening and group facilitation skills
• What structures do we have and need to support collaboration in our community? How to build further partnerships?
• How to engage parents in the culture of our school?

This is the second post about how to develop a curriculum review system in one’s school. It deals with answering questions about the culture of one’s school and how folks deal with change. Just as the first post on the big picture, these are questions for members of the community to work through before they begin designing their system.

1) How does your school make decisions?

2) Who is involved?

3) How does your school handle change?

4) What are strengths and weaknesses of your school culture?

5) How can you build on the strengths in (re)designing your system for curriculum creation and review?

6) How can you overcome or lessen the weaknesses?

7) How do your administrators and teachers value the curriculum in the grand scheme of things?

Where are you with your teaming and collaboration at grade levels and departments?

9) What is the level of trust in your teams?

10) How ready are they to divide up the units to be developed or reviewed by just a few team members?

11) What other questions (and answers) come to mind?