The quest to make schooling more effective has provided educators with a myriad of classroom instructional practices—cooperative learning, peer tutoring, and mastery learning. Yet, teachers are often left in a quandary about which practice might work best under a given context.
Lin Frederick, a 1st grade teacher at Robert Reid Laboratory School, and I began to search for a framework with which to coordinate and validate potential instructional practices as well as align learning practices with the strengths and developmental levels of students. Frederick and I believed that if students helped create the curriculum, the classroom dialogue about this process would shed light on how to make learning experiences more cohesive and purposeful. So, over the course of a school year, we created the Learning-Centered Curriculum-Making Project.
The process of creating curriculum became a regular component of Frederick's classroom. Frederick and the students developed each unit over a two-week period, with the design of one unit overlapping the study of the preceding one. To develop the units, Frederick highlighted the language and thinking skills related to the disciplines of math, art, social studies, language arts, geography, and science, using techniques such as dialogue, coaching, modeling, questioning, and reinforcing. These techniques led students through three interrelated steps: (1) selecting the target theme (the focus for developing the curriculum); (2) establishing guiding questions to serve as the scope and sequence of the thematic unit; and (3) designing the classroom instructional activities. As they worked through the three-step process, the students themselves chose the activities that best suited their developmental levels.
Selecting the Target Theme
Before working with the students to select the target theme, Frederick first identified potential themes: for example, polar animals, whales, and dinosaurs, reptiles, sea life. When selecting potential themes, Frederick considered the following questions: (1) Did they meet the student learning objectives established by the school district and by national curriculum committees? (2) Did they build upon previous classroom experiences, or would they be useful for future classroom experiences? (3) Were the needed resources available? and (4) Were the themes interesting?
Next, Frederick introduced the potential themes to the class, providing books and materials for exploring them. Throughout the following week, the class researched and discussed each of the potential themes, including what the students knew about the themes and how the themes related to previous or future studies.
Although Frederick initially modeled the cognitive self-talk underlying the selection of target themes, students soon engaged in collaborative dialogue. As a class, they discussed reasons for selecting the different target themes for 20 minutes each day, but participated in discussions and independent exploration of the books and materials throughout the week. The discussions were often wide-ranging, but by the end of the week, the students had selected the next target theme, for example, the theme of whales.
Besides choosing the target theme, the discussions served several other important functions. First, they provided Frederick with a forum for judging the interest level of the group as well as the particular interests of individual students. Second, they helped her to better understand the varying levels of background knowledge that the children had about the target themes. Third, they helped students to connect previous learning to the target theme and to begin to focus on the information that they considered important. Finally, they helped the students formulate questions they had in regard to the target theme, setting the stage for the second step.
Establishing Guiding Questions
In the second step, Frederick and the students developed the questions that would guide their study. The primary goals of this step were to provide the students with an outline of the scope and sequence of the interdisciplinary unit, to provide a structure for the unit of study, to ensure the cultivation of higher-level thought processes (recall, analysis, comparison, inference, and evaluation), and to provide the framework for developing the instructional activities.
Before initiating discussions with the students, Frederick determined the full scope and sequence of study that were required for the theme across the disciplines. To ensure that the unit was fully developed, she considered the following questions: (1) What were the scope and sequence of the student learning objectives established by the school district and national curriculum committees? (2) How much time should be allocated to the unit? (3) What were the developmental levels and needs of the children? (4) What previous and future classroom experiences related to the theme? and (5) What resources were available?
To guide the discussion, Frederick used an interdisciplinary curriculum wheel, a six-point graphic display in which the target theme was the hub of the wheel and the disciplines were the spokes. This display encouraged the students to explore the theme from the perspective of all six disciplines. Using the interdisciplinary curriculum wheel helped to provoke interest in areas that the students might otherwise have ignored and highlighted areas not being covered by the brainstorming session. The aim was not, however, to have an equal number of questions per discipline.
Frederick began by discussing with the students the distinct characteristics of each of the disciplines and how each discipline allowed them to view the theme from a different perspective. She then asked the students to spend approximately two minutes privately brainstorming the “things that they wanted to learn about the target theme.” The students then brainstormed as a group, during which Frederick encouraged “free-wheeling” to promote spontaneous and unusual responses. Frederick recorded the different questions.
Part of the brainstorming activity included deciding under which discipline to place a question. In the following example, Frederick models her thinking in context, as well as prompting her students to take possession of the thinking she models. Russell: I want to know how big whales are.Frederick: That's a great question. Do you mean how long they are or how much they weigh?Russell: Both.Frederick: [Writes the question under the math section]. I'm thinking that because math involves thinking about numbers, this question should go under the math section.Mary: We should compare the different sizes of the whales. It could go under the math section because it's a number question, too.Bob: I want to find out how whales breathe in the water.Frederick: Where do you think we should put that question?Bob: I think it should go under the science section because how animals breathe and stuff is a natural thing.
To ensure that the questions generated would cover the full range of the thinking process from recall to synthesis, Frederick also posed questions. For example, following a question about where whales live, she asked, “I wonder why they live in some places and not in others?”
After the brainstorming session, Frederick conducted a follow-up session in which the students categorized their potpourri of questions into the guiding questions for the unit. As the class categorized the questions, Frederick used the interdisciplinary curriculum wheel and colored markers to highlight the questions that were related to one another. Frederick: [Highlighting several questions] I'm thinking that these questions all focus on general facts about whales such as their names and things they eat. I will use this red marker to highlight these kinds of questions. Tell me some other questions that might be considered general questions.Jack: How big whales are is a general question.Frederick: Yes, I think that you are right [highlighting the question in red]. Tell us why you think it is a general question.Jack: Because it is just a fact. You really don't have to think a lot about it. You just have to know it. So it should be a general question.Russell: It's not like those other questions where you have to think about how things are the same and different.Frederick: You mean these questions [pointing out some comparison questions] that we have highlighted in green [for example, How are whales like other mammals?].
- [Recall] What are the basic facts about whales?
- [Analysis] What are the characteristics of whales?
- [Comparison] How are whales the same and different from each other and from other species?
- [Inference] Why do whales live in the oceans?
- [Evaluation] Should whales be captured for zoos?
The brainstorming and follow-up sessions typically lasted 30 to 40 minutes. As the students began to study the unit, Frederick conducted additional follow-up sessions to review the guiding questions and to consider other potential guiding questions. For example, because students had learned that whaling was controversial, they developed the question “What is the future for whales?” in a follow-up session.
Designing Instructional Activities
After developing the guiding questions, Frederick and the students decided on the instructional activities they would use for studying the theme unit. The development of these activities—the “nuts and bolts” of the Learning-Centered Curriculum-Making Project—required two sessions.
In the first session, the students brainstormed all the potential sources of information they could use to study the theme while Frederick recorded the students' suggestions on butcher paper. Frederick and the students then explored the most appropriate sources of information for each of the guiding questions, which included discussing the characteristics of distinct types of information. For example, they decided that books with maps were an appropriate information source for learning where whales live.
In the second session, the class developed the instructional activities. Frederick listed each of the students' suggestions under one of the guiding questions. Then the class discussed which activities, based on their characteristics (for example, the amount of time or the materials required), were most appropriate for each area of study.
Frederick used think-aloud statements to prompt students to think through their suggestions. For example, when a student suggested that the group could do experiments to learn the names of whales, Frederick responded, “Let's think about some experiments that would help us to learn the names of whales.” After some discussion, the group concluded that conducting experiments would not be a good way to learn the names of whales. She then guided them toward more appropriate strategies.
Discussions about the instructional activities led to dialogues about students' own learning styles and the many different ways of learning. To prompt students to think about their own learning preferences and strengths, Frederick used statements such as “I learn [blank] by [blank].” She also asked questions like “How do you learn [blank]?” Frederick used the answers to these statements to ensure that the activities chosen would cover a number of modalities and the full gamut of instructional possibilities and grouping patterns such as group projects, learning centers, discussion, and research. As part of the discussion, she also reminded students about the different curriculum-making steps: Frederick: We have thought a lot about the kinds of things we want to find out about whales. We have also thought about all of the different sources of information that we can use to study whales. Now, we need to develop the things we will do to learn these things.Let's start with the question about the basic facts that we want to know about whales. The things we want to know here are all things that we have to remember. So we need to think about things that we can do to help us remember these things.Caity: I know, we can develop a memory game.Frederick: Tell me more about that.Caity: We can take cards and put the thing we want to know on one side and what it is on the other. Then we can practice it a lot.Frederick: [Writing the activity down] Yes, that would be a good way of learning these things. I learn these things best by practicing a lot. Does anybody learn these things in a different way?Aaron: I learn things if I can read stories that have pictures and stuff about the whales. I get bored if I just practice.Frederick: So another way we could learn these basic things about whales is to read stories.Ryan: Yes! Read books about whales, then at recess we would go play and talk about whales.Frederick: [Writing down the suggestion] That's a good suggestion. You can learn a lot by reading about things and then talking about them with friends. Discussions such as this resulted in a number of instructional activities for each of the guiding questions.
The guiding questions and the extent to which the students successfully completed the activities provided the basis for evaluating the effectiveness of the curriculum. Because of the nature of the instructional activities, assessments were performance-based. For example, Frederick assessed the extent to which students could recall substantive facts about whales by evaluating the comprehensiveness of the students' “whale facts books.” This assessment revealed that across all ability levels, the students had met the learning objectives they and Frederick had set.
Powerful Learning
We continue to refine our Learning-Centered Curriculum-Making Project, looking at issues such as how the process will change across the grade levels. We also are contemplating how to move from basal readers and texts as the primary sources of information toward a broader array of resources that includes emerging technology. And because school district regulations require that all materials be assessed in regards to their appropriateness for classroom use, we are working on more efficient procedures with which to screen the materials that children bring to the classroom.
We are currently working on extending this project to include the assessment process. Preliminary attempts suggest that a collaborative classroom dialogue helps to create performance assessments symmetric with the classroom instructional activities. Students have much to offer in the design of more relevant and functional assessment procedures.
Although interest in the project has spread widely among teachers at the school, some of the them have difficulty thinking of students as curriculum designers. Teachers, however, need to capitalize on students' understanding of the nature and point of educational activities in order to determine which instructional practices best fit the context of a particular class. Through the Learning-Centered Curriculum-Making Project, students were able to indicate which teaching methods worked best for them. Furthermore, the dialogue of the curriculum-making process, along with the learning and thinking strategies associated with specific learning tasks, initiated students into the language, processes, constraints, and actions of skilled problem solvers.
