If we are to improve the education we offer all children, reformers must stop blaming teachers and start working with them. As Hirsch explains, The single most effective way to enhance teacher effectiveness is to create a more coherent multi-year curriculum, so that teachers at each level will know what students have already been taught. A cumulative, rigorous curriculum is not a cure-all, but it is an essential platform for teachers to work together within and across grades. Schools can choose to write their own curriculum, adopt one, adapt a few—whatever works for them, so long as the result is a content-specific, coherent, cumulative body of knowledge and skills to be learned in each grade. Such a curriculum narrows the gaps in children’s abilities, makes differentiation more doable and effective, and enables the school community to deeply understand and support each child’s year-to-year progress. In reform circles, however, curriculum is rarely discussed. blog.coreknowledge.org/2014/07/15/if-only-we-had-listened/
Posted on: Wed, 16 Jul 2014 12:48:12 +0000