Curriculum Review and Collaboration

Image Source: Adopted from Johneric Advento’s revised version of Margaret Carpenter’s original diagram

Our Shifting Our Schools podcast, Jeff’s and my blogs, and countless other podcasts and blogs share ways to help educators shift from traditional style, teacher-directed classrooms to what we call the Learning or School 2.0 model. This “shift” with all its edublogger advocates is about the change process, which we know is difficult to manage and is not happening very quickly.

While I enjoy discussing the big picture and ideas, my practice as an instructional technologist focuses on the practical, in-the-classroom instruction and assessment strategies that help transform classrooms into 21st-century learning communities.

My belief in bringing about this transformation is that schools must develop a curriculum and collaborative systematic model that becomes the mechanism for shifting our classrooms and our schools to the School 2.0 model. Sadly, curriculum development carries an uncomfortable connotation for many educators. The curriculum should be the driving force that guides so much of what we do to affect our students’ learning. If handled well, curriculum development, as a part of an engaged and thriving learning community, can be an exciting process that shifts and transforms our schools. This is obvious information, but sadly, we often put little thought into how we develop or follow through with our curriculum.

We often discussed this on our SOS podcast, with one show centered on the work of the International School Bangkok’s technology resource coordinators and literacy specialists. The ISB team constructed a curriculum development model, and recently, Kim Cofino created a collaboration flow chart that nicely presents a model for other schools to review and possibly adopt and individualize to meet their needs.

Back to the practical, Kim will present at the Learning 2.008 conference next week about the importance of curriculum and collaboration in bringing about the shift in our schools. After watching Kim’s slide show for her presentation, I remembered a workshop I started to assemble for another conference. It dealt with how a school learning community begins designing its curriculum and collaboration system. As I cannot attend the Learning 2.008 conference, it makes sense to get the components for my workshop out there as a practical way to help support Kim’s and others’ efforts. Each school is different, and whether one looks at the ISB model or the one we created at HKIS, developing the model needs to start by engaging all the stakeholders in the discussion.

My next posts will share the questions that teachers and administrators can use to start their discussion as they develop a systematic way to review curriculum that integrates the instructional strategies, content, assessments, and 21st-century learning skills that will shift their schools to the Learning 2.0 model.