December 2003/January 2004
| Volume 61 | Number 4
New Needs, New Curriculum
Marge Scherer
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Elliot W. Eisner
The unknowable future is not a sound basis on which to plan curriculum and instruction, writes Elliot W. Eisner. We can best prepare students for the future by enabling them to deal effectively with the present. To create “an education process that is genuinely meaningful to students and that challenges them with problems and ideas that they find both interesting and intellectually demanding,” he recommends that schools cultivate in students the following abilities: dealing with problems that have more than one correct answer, critiquing ideas; using multiple forms of literacy to develop the mind; working with others collectively and cooperatively; and making a contribution to the larger community. The author concludes that “genuine reform and improvement of our schools will require a shift in paradigms from those with which we have become comfortable.”
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Deborah Perkins-Gough
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John I. Goodlad
The author tells the story of Allison Davis, a noted African American scholar whose research in the 1940s challenged the conventional wisdom of the day that social inequalities resulted from biology, documenting the role of environmental factors in denying equal opportunity to people of color. “The struggle for justice, equity, respect, and appreciation for human diversity has been long and often troubled,” writes Goodlad. Citing “the human race's proclivity for arranging its members in hierarchies of strongly maintained status and privilege,” Goodlad argues that schools have an important role to play in teaching our young people about the ideals of democracy and equality, but the larger community must support this message. He concludes that education based on our commonly held beliefs can ultimately move us beyond social prejudices and injustice.
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Marvin Cetron and Kimberley Cetron
Education ranks high among the personal and political priorities of most people in the United States. Before considering our goals for education in the coming years, however, we must consider the environment in which schools will operate in the future. The authors of this article, a nationally known futurist and a teacher, analyze four societal trends that are pointing the direction for forward-thinking schools. For each trend—limited funding, an increasing population of difficult-to-teach students, technology's impact on the workplace, and the need for lifelong learning—the authors reflect on some of the education reforms that can help schools respond positively.
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Geneva Gay
With student populations growing increasingly diverse, schools and educators can no longer afford to treat multicultural education as a luxury of convenience. The author makes the case for a strong multicultural curriculum, citing research that suggests it improves academic success and helps prepare students for productive and active citizenship. Filtering multicultural education through three general principles of curriculum development—reality, representation, and relevance—the author provides classroom examples of some successful multicultural curricular initiatives.
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Harvey Daniels and Steven Zemelman
Why read textbooks that are heavy, unreadable, superficial, chaotic, authoritarian, and inaccurate, when fascinating, important, debatable, and sometimes inflammatory nonfiction, from partisan magazines to primary source materials to stirring biographies, is widely available? The authors argue that turning students into lifelong learners must happen in school, with students reading real texts—newspapers, magazines, and nonfiction trade books—to examine compelling issues. The authors describe a five-week cross-disciplinary study of the fast food industry undertaken by seniors at the Best Practice High School in Chicago. Turning students into lifelong learners will also spark teachers' love of reading.
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Tom March
A well-designed WebQuest combines research-supported instructional practices with effective use of the Internet to create successful learning experiences for both students and teachers. Sometimes so-called WebQuests fall short in their implementation. As one of the principal architects of WebQuests, the author defines a real WebQuest as a scaffolded learning structure that links essential resources on the World Wide Web to an authentic task. Such projects motivate students' investigation of an open-ended question, development of individual expertise, and foster participation in a group process that transforms newly acquired information into a more sophisticated understanding. The best WebQuests inspire students to see richer thematic relationships, facilitate a contribution to the real world of learning, and reflect on their own metacognitive processes. The author examines the learner-centered strategies of WebQuests and shows how they benefit the learning of students and professional development of teachers.
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Stephanie L. Norby
Have you often thought you'd like to bring primary sources into the classroom, but you haven't quite figured out what to use or how to present it? The author, director of the Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies, discusses museum resources that can help teachers confidently work with primary source materials in the classroom. Published lesson plans using primary sources, a new Web site geared for educators, and professional development opportunities are all a click away.
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Elliott Seif
What is worth learning? The author argues that history/social studies curriculums must focus on enduring understandings and encourage students to tackle essential questions for meaningful learning to take place. Using Understanding by Design, three districts in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, have revamped and streamlined their social studies curriculum to align with this approach. The author shows why backward design—starting with the desired results and working backward to derive an understanding-based curriculum—makes sense. He then examines some implications of this approach for classroom and student learning.
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Susan Santone
To bring about a secure and sustainable future, students need to become active citizens, fully engaged in creating a better world. The author, who is executive director of Creative Change Educational Solutions, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, describes the evolution of the sustainability movement, its tenets, and the increasing number of school- and community-based initiatives that focus on reducing sprawl, redeveloping urban areas, using renewable energy, and encouraging environmentally friendly businesses. She argues that sustainability education infuses a sense of purpose and relevance across disciplines while providing a rigorous response to academic mandates. In doing so, sustainability education can improve teaching and learning while preparing students for the biggest test of all: life.
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Elizabeth A. Grady
The Future Shock program in a public high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, gets students involved in public health. Funded by ASCD in 2000 as part of the association's Health in Education Initiative, the program encourages students to address local public health issues, collect quality data, analyze results, and produce conclusions and recommendations that might lead to public policy adjustments. The author discusses the program's action-curriculum and student research topics.
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Beth Pateman
Recent research has focused attention on the importance of health education for today's youth. Students' health significantly affects their academic achievement, and effective school health programs can improve students' avoidance of the six high-risk behaviors that cause most serious health problems among people over 5 years old: alcohol and other drug use, high-risk sexual behaviors, tobacco use, poor dietary choices, physical inactivity, and behaviors that result in unintentional or intentional injury. The author describes a skills-based approach to health education, which is based on the National Health Education Standards developed in 1995. She tells how the Council of Chief State School Officers' Health Education Assessment Project is working to develop standards-based health education assessment resources that support K–12 teachers in their efforts to provide effective health education.
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Phillip Moulds
Rich tasks involve students in connecting their learning purposefully to the real world. More than theme-related or context-related topics, rich tasks offer a way to reconceptualize the curriculum and teach more effectively. By linking real tasks with traditional curriculum topics, teachers can approach topics in context, build student understanding, and make connections within and between topics and disciplines. The author explains how a chemistry class engaged in a rich task that examined the water quality of the Brisbane River by learning about solubility and acid/base chemistry, collecting data from the Brisbane River, writing reports that examined their scientific processes, and making well-justified recommendations for improving the water quality of the Brisbane River.
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Alex Molnar
Strapped for cash, schools are increasingly looking to commercial sources for funding. Or so would suggest the results of the Sixth Annual Survey of Commercialism in Public Schools conducted by the Education Policy Studies Laboratory's Commercialism in Education Research Unit at Arizona State University. The author reports that commercial activity in schools is on the rise, with schools increasingly choosing to partner with corporations in such areas as exclusive agreements, incentive programs, appropriation of space, sponsored educational materials, electronic marketing, and fundraising. But resistance to schoolhouse commercialism is also growing, as educators and parents voice their concerns about subordinating schools and students to the marketplace.
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David Alpert
The author, a 3rd grade teacher, describes the importance of teaching from a conceptual curriculum—one that guides students to discover knowledge for themselves through a flexible learning environment and rich, interconnected content—rather than merely feeding students isolated facts. He decided that studying insects would not only attract students' curiosity, but would also embrace the curriculum's overarching concepts, which he developed in response to 3rd graders' unique developmental needs. The concepts encourage and embrace students' dawning sense of identity; their developing independence; their growing insight on what causes societal change; and their broadening understanding of how they and others reason. The in-depth study of insects inside and outside the classroom, and across the curriculum, stimulated students' growing intellectual independence and enabled them to see the similarities between their world and an insect's world.
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Diana Shulla-Cose and Kimberlie Day
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John H. Holloway
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Rick Allen
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Denis P. Doyle
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Miriam Goldstein
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