There we were: 120 students and 35 preservice teachers creating curriculum together. At the beginning of each semester, we were scared. By the end of each semester, we were confident.
For two years, I have participated in a partnership project with a nearby elementary school to design courses of study on students' interests. In this project, my university preservice teachers have the opportunity to work with a group of two to three children for one and one-half hours a day, one day a week. We give up the teacher's manuals, the mandates, the curriculum guides, the list of state-approved learning outcomes, and a nebulous factory mentality in favor of engaging students in the simple process of learning how to learn.
We believe that learning how to learn is much more important than learning what to learn. Our belief is in direct contrast to rigid curriculum programs and other structured reading programs, in which ideas and skills are predetermined and sequenced by outside authorities. Our authorities are the students and their teachers. Students use reading, writing, and thinking skills and build content knowledge into a social constructivist set of teaching and learning beliefs that value process over product. This approach is not for everyone, but I have found it to be successful with many kinds of learners.
A Student-Generated Curriculum
The students in this program work in groups of two or three with a preservice teacher who is a guide, resident scholar, and group member. A typical group activity involves brainstorming and deciding what the group is interested in learning. If consensus on a topic cannot be reached, individual topics are chosen. For 1st graders, researching a topic might be completed in one session. For 4th graders, planning, reading, writing, responding, and sharing might take two to six sessions with each session lasting two hours.
One group of 1st graders wanted to study bats. The preservice teacher gathered bat books, encyclopedia entries, and a model of a bat. For three sessions, the group read, listened, talked, drew, and savored bats. They learned that bats do not suck blood from their hosts. However, one type of bat makes a puncture wound in an animal and licks the oozing blood. When they learned this piece of information, some of the glamour went out of the term vampire bat, but the students quickly replaced their fascination with bloodsucking bats with the pride of being able to tell other people about this amazing information.
A group of 2nd graders wanted to study eyes. The preservice teacher brought in books on eyes and a gross of cow eyeballs from the local butcher. Gloved and armed with dissecting knives, the group dissected, poked, prodded, and weighed the eyeballs—and, of course, removed and looked through the lenses. This group of three students quickly turned into a group of 25, each of whom waited patiently for a turn to participate.
Two 5th graders chose to study flowers. Their preservice teacher provided flower-identification guides, a flower press, flower seeds, garden books, and a flower scrapbook. The girls studied their resources, picked flowers, pressed them, mounted them, and made a formal presentation.
One 5th grader studied panda bears: where they lived; what they ate; and how they gave birth, lived, and died. He presented the information that he learned to his peers.
These examples are remarkable learning experiences only because the students themselves made the important decisions about what to study, how to study it, and how to demonstrate to others what they had learned. They were not merely engaged in a student-centered curriculum; they were engaged in a student-generated curriculum.
We teachers did what all good teachers do: We offered options, resources, guidance, and participation. We modeled and demonstrated what curiosity looks like, what the curious mind does when it seeks to know, and how satisfaction comes from intellectual and academic curiosity. We demonstrated how to think about the world through science, history, geography, math, art, literature, and literacy. We demonstrated that knowledge is interconnected and is available from multiple perspectives.
Teaching Against the Grain
The social-constructivist approach to teaching is a lonely one because most teachers prefer, or are forced, to stick to the preplanned curriculum. For support, I rely heavily on scholars who advocate constructivism, such as Jerry Harste (Harste, Watson, & Copeland, 1993; Harste, 1994) and the 1997 panel at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) that featured Ann L. Brown and Marlene Scardamalia (Bereiter et al., 1997). Of course, the scholar who is most notably recognized for his work with social-constructivist philosophies is Lev Vygotsky (Dixon-Krauss, 1996), the Russian psychologist.
Social-constructivist teaching and learning is nonconformist, open to variation in the outcome of what has been learned, and more reliant on teacher authority than on state authority. It also requires that the educators who teach student-generated curriculums be mature, experienced, confident, resourceful, and lifelong learners.
Frank Smith compares the differences between the social-constructivist and the typical state-approved views of how learning occurs (Smith, 1998). He states that the classical view on which social-constructivist teaching is based says that learning is continual, effortless, independent of reward and punishment, never forgotten, inhibited by testing, and dependent on the growth of the learner. Smith points out that the official view of learning, in contrast, says that learning is occasional, hard work, dependent on reward and punishment, easily forgotten, ensured by testing, and dependent on memorization. Teachers and communities willing to explore the constructivist approach to curriculum development will need to constantly review the differences between classical and official views of learning.
What Students Want to Learn
After working with more than 200 preservice teachers in this curriculum-generating process, I have seen every conceivable learning situation and topic emerge. Some students have earnestly requested to study video games, Ninja Turtles, and Play-Doh. Others have been resistant and reluctant learners whose curiosities about their world have been either underdeveloped or squashed by frustration.
The majority of students, however, can't talk fast enough in telling us what they want to learn. They want to study Jesse James, dinosaurs, poetry, architecture, archaeology, zoology, Africa, origami, flying, science experiments (by far the most popular request), puppets, Thomas Jefferson, Shel Silverstein, skeletons, kites, and beads. Their interests are entirely unpredictable, and the preservice teachers quickly learn that there is no such thing as a topic more suitable for boys than for girls or for 1st graders than for 4th graders. Anyone at any grade may like nothing, everything, or all things in between.
Ten Key Considerations
- Garner support and start small. Teachers who use their students as curricular informants must have the support of administrators and parents. Teachers must keep administrators informed about their plans and progress and communicate with parents in open houses, newsletters, and dialogue. The most important thing to share with all stakeholders is the student work: what students have learned and produced and what their plans are for future learning.
- Use library resources. Creating curriculum in a contemporary classroom requires library books and nonprint media. Befriending school and local librarians is a first, major, and ongoing step. Without these resources, constructing a student-generated curriculum is not possible.
- Give up the guides and get ready to model. Teachers must be willing to teach without the aid—and the restriction—of curriculum guides or mandated objectives. Implementing a student-generated curriculum means a temporary, and conceivably permanent, reprieve from following the curriculum experts. Teachers must be able to model what a curious learner does: explore topics of interest from a variety of perspectives, ask questions, connect new learning with old, and share what he or she has learned.
- Develop assessment tools. Assessments must be accomplished through students' performances, demonstrations, experiences, explanations, writing, portfolios, and self-evaluations. End-of-unit worksheets, lists of isolated spelling words, multiple-choice exams, and true-false tests will not be helpful in gauging students' academic and literacy growth in a constructivist curriculum.
- Allow for the noise. Teachers and students must accept that they will be working in a classroom environment that is not quiet. The classroom will be busy, interactive, mobile, and probably messy. Strict end-of-the-day rituals for organizing and cleaning will ensure that everyone's work area is in usable condition for the next day.
- Schedule record keeping. At the end of each day, students must log in what they worked on and what they plan to do the next day. The log entry could include books used, ideas shared, problems encountered, successes achieved, and stray thoughts for future reflection. This record keeping will let the teacher know exactly what's going on in the classroom. It will demonstrate that time spent on constructivist learning activities is time well spent.
- Don't panic; a routine will come. Teachers must give themselves time to develop a routine. An atmosphere of impending doom will not allow full enjoyment of the constructivist process or full opportunity for the process to work. Generating a curriculum takes time and persistence. It requires a firm belief that the process can succeed. Create a support system of other teachers who are interested in the constructivist concept. Without a support team, this kind of curriculum can be a daunting and lonely task. And schedule at least 90 minutes of uninterrupted work time for your students.
- Be a learner. This kind of curriculum requires everyone in the classroom to be a learner. Be willing to learn about subjects that interest the students. But recognize that no one person can be interested in every topic that students find fascinating. It is a rare teacher who finds both origami and Jesse James intriguing and worth studying. Sometimes you must feign enthusiasm and simply wait for the next set of topics to find its way into the classroom.
- Communicate unanxious expectations. Constructing curriculum from students' perspectives is both worthwhile and stressful. Replace anxious questions with confident questions. An anxious question is, What if the students aren't learning anything? A confident question is, What ordinary evidence is readily available to document what the students are actually learning?
- Gather data weekly. No more than once a week, thoroughly document what is working and what could be improved. Use photos, videos, formal observations, written summaries, and student feedback to evaluate the learning. Use the data to make the program more efficient. Share the data with the students and their parents. Let them draw their own conclusions. Their ownership of the classroom is the key component to a successful classroom under construction.
Constructing curriculum with students is a lively process that can lead to high levels of independent learning and great leaps of individual knowledge. Giving students the freedom to explore their world confidently and routinely is one of the most important learning experiences that schools provide.
