Intellectual Challenge: Making Curriculum Work for Us

1. Intellectual Challenge:Making Curriculum Work for Us Betz Lund

2. Are High Academic Expectations Only For Those College Bound? • Short answer: NO! • Not everyone goes to college • Consider our graduates • Trade school, job force, military • Paradigm shift: from college prep to intellectual challenge • Try to focus on multicultural curriculum that challenges each student

3. ExpectationsPast affecting future • Be realistic about our students • HISTORY of poor academic performance • Not a guarantee a future of it • Don’t let that history determine their future with us • We already focus on positive relationships and environments for them • Keep it up! • These help students find success and motivation to succeed

4. Believe to Achieve • If we believe they can they will • EFFORT and DETERMINATION and PERSERVERANCE • Our attitude affects their ability to reach potential • Not going to be easy • We can make a difference for more students • Curriculum needs to go beyond playing catch up • Ignore achievement gap, focus on students learning • Eliminate remedial classes • Push higher academics • Eliminate boring classes

5. Raising the Bar • To increase student achievement • We must believe that our students can succeed • Must be willing to work to make it happen • Teaching should be FUN • More than paper and pencil work over and over • We need to be more focused on teaching • Responsibility • Creativity • Critical Thinking

6. Teaching Beyond Expected • Expect more than the state standards • Teach them above and beyond standards • Breaking a few rules • Study which standards can be removed • Teach the essentials • We need to choose a mile long trench an inch deep or a shorter trench that goes deeper • Less standards mean deeper understanding

7. Bloom to the Rescue • While developing curriculum remember to include examples of 5 or 6 parts of Bloom’s taxonomy • Evaluate how the textbook, and current materials address the levels • Push students to use more than the just the lower levels • More: evaluate, decide, measure and test • Less: list define, tell, quote, and name

8. Knowledge is a Process Not a Sequence • Need to shift from seeing knowledge as a hierarchical viewpoint • Tends to focus on the procedural lower level thinking • Focus on the process of knowing • Mastery of a topic is less important than being able to manipulate content • Students learn material and how it connects to them rather than memorize definitions from scholarly experts

9. University Style Classroom • Comprehension driven-not fact driven • “Comprehensible Connectors” • Use students’ prior knowledge to help them to learn and remember new • Multicultural perspective will help this • Mini-lectures • Smaller shorter chunks of information • Teach note taking • Small group work • Students helping students • Connect to other topics • Utilize technology

10. Enabling Strategies and Scaffolding • Help students think more complexly • Modeling -what to do and thought process behind it • Scaffolding is four part enabling strategy • Build knowledge and connect it to themselves • Work through example students will do alone • Teacher and student construct together • Students work independently • Be careful not to over scaffold and over map out what students are asked to do.

11. We can do this! • Classroom is an intellectual space • Teach and apprentice our students • Students produce knowledge • They do NOT consume it • Break away from the Prescribed • We are who we teach • We are creative, intelligent and knowledgeable • So let’s teach the way that does right for us all