At Jackson-Keller Elementary School in San Antonio, Texas, Kristy Herrera points to a familiar chart on the wall.
"Which of these Core Commonalities has the most to do with weather?" she asks her 2nd grade class.
"Connections to Nature?" a child responds.
"Good," says Kristy. "Any others?"
"The Use of Symbols?"
"Response to the Aesthetic?"
The class goes on to form a weather unit based on those underlying themes. The children assemble a slide show of paintings depicting weather scenes. The first one is "Tornado Over Kansas." They discuss references to weather in classical and contemporary music; research weather issues in the broadcast media and on a CD-ROM program; perform their own weather forecasts, using symbols to show the location of storms on a map; and develop a pamphlet on tornado safety procedures. They conduct experiments on rainfall and evaporation and make up imaginative stories about the cloud formations they observed. When they finish the unit, the children have done much more than just learn about the weather.
Jackson-Keller Elementary is one of a cohort of 21 schools nationwide that currently comprise the Basic School Network, which, for the past three years, has been using Core Commonalities as the basis for developing the unique potential of every child in the classroom.
An Adaptable Basis for Coherent Curriculums
The Basic School Network, funded by the Ewing Marian Kauffman Foundation and housed at James Madison University in Virginia, implements the Basic School concept set forth by the renowned educator Ernest L. Boyer. In 1995, in his last and perhaps most influential work, The Basic School: A Community for Learning, the late president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching introduced the Core Commonalities—a system of eight themes that underlie all human experience—as part of an overall proposal for renewing the earliest years of learning.
- The Life Cycle
- The Use of Symbols
- Membership in Groups
- A Sense of Time and Space
- Response to the Aesthetic
- Connections to Nature
- Producing and Consuming
- Living with Purpose
Boyer envisioned the Core Commonalities as a framework for integrated thematic curriculums, answering a call for an end to the traditional, fragmented approach to content delivery, as supported by research by Caine and Caine. The Basic School and Core Commonalities represent an alternative format for education, essentially reorienting the teaching and learning of traditional disciplines. "Within these eight themes," Boyer wrote, "every traditional subject or academic discipline can find a home."
Indeed, every academic discipline is rooted in one or more commonalities. This is not to suggest that there is a definitive correlation between specific commonalities and disciplines, although some connections are obvious. For example, A Sense of Time and Space may immediately suggest a theme for history, but it branches into other disciplines as well—anthropology, geography, government, economics, and environmental sciences. Children are thus encouraged to consider where they are located in a large, multidimensional universe.
Through The Life Cycle, as children delve into the sciences, mathematics, economics, the arts, language, and history, they gain an appreciation for life's absolutes and how others have viewed them.
High-level integration of the disciplines is possible within each commonality. Through The Use of Symbols, pupils in a language class learn principles they can also apply to mathematics, the arts, and philosophy. They discover that people from various cultures have developed different literary, numeric, and artistic symbol systems that connect people to one another and are able to enhance—or diminish—human understanding.
With the Core Commonalities at the root of their learning, children in Basic Schools see the relevance of traditional disciplines to their daily lives.
The Development of Teaching Units
Teaching units in Basic Schools focus on literacy—broadly defined to include language, mathematics, and the arts—in a literature-based format that emphasizes clear connections among the disciplines and their relation to life experiences.
Curriculum development begins with a review of district and state standards and mandates for grade-specific student achievement. As teachers make logical and creative decisions to prioritize content, themes emerge, and the Core Commonalities come into play. Teachers choose and use primary and secondary commonalities as lenses through which they view content, broaden its scope, and create teaching units that will address and integrate the traditional disciplines.
Teachers determine the main ideas each unit should convey and develop them into several goals for understanding. Then they define literacy goals—the process skills to be taught and reinforced—and pose key questions around which child-centered activities will revolve, ultimately moving the unit toward its goals for understanding.
The Basic School Network currently includes 18 public urban and suburban schools, one Christian, one Catholic, and one Native American tribal school. No two Basic Schools are alike; the units developed at Sugar Grove Elementary, a Christian school in Ohio, are necessarily different from those at Tiospa Zina, a tribal school in South Dakota. But the framework of the Core Commonalities works equally well in both settings.
Throughout the Network, schools share teaching unit ideas and materials (literature in particular) within given themes, but find that entire units do not transplant well beyond the borders of the district and state for which they were designed. As the number of schools in the Network grows, those based in a common district will be able to collaborate on curriculum development.
And the Children Shall Lead
The weather unit at Jackson-Keller Elementary School used Response to the Aesthetic as its primary Core Commonality, and Connections to Nature and The Use of Symbols as secondary ones. The children were able to engage in activities far more comprehensive than those of a traditional science class.
At Downtown Open Elementary School in Minneapolis, a schoolwide unit, "Extra, Extra: Communication Basics!" started with The Use of Symbols, and developed activities to include a host of other related topics, revolving around three questions: How do people communicate? How can people communicate responsibly? and What steps can people take to improve their communication skills?
Students explored a variety of media, from cave paintings and picture writing to the performing arts, as means of communication. They learned about Gutenberg's movable type and compared block typesetting with word processing. They used a map to locate the sites of events in the news; developed their art and mathematics skills by working on illustrations and scale drawings; researched the lives of influential communicators such as Martin Luther King, Jr.; and, with the help of their music teacher, created a video on Dr. King, complete with rhythms and rap. As a culminating activity, they reviewed newscasts; visited a local newspaper and television station; and learned and practiced requisite writing, oral, and computer communication skills to create their own newspaper.
At Mantua Elementary School in Fairfax, Virginia, 6th graders explore a single theme throughout the entire year—but that theme has multiple strands. This year's theme is "Discovery," and the strands (with the Core Commonalities from which they emerge) are Discover Your Roots (A Sense of Time and Space); Discover Conflict (Membership in Groups); Discover New Territory (Connections to Nature, Producing and Consuming); and Discover Your Potential (Living With Purpose, The Life Cycle).
Activities within these strands connect social studies, language arts, math, science, the arts, and physical education in imaginative ways. Students learn about the Age of Discovery and Native Americans in social studies, while studying weather and its impact on migration. They discover the cultural roots of mathematical patterns as they learn about the navigational methods and computations used by early explorers. In language arts, they examine the work and methodology of historians, research primary and secondary historical sources, and read Native American myths and stories to acquire a sense of time and place as well as facts. In art, students study and replicate historical art and artifacts. In physical education, they learn and participate in Native American games. In music, they learn sea chanteys and folk songs of the early settlers and find clues about life at the time.
A Class Act
Children in Basic Schools say they learn better when disciplines are integrated with one another and with their lives. They show that to be true as they develop independent thinking and are able to derive subtle meanings from the things they've learned.
Parents are happy about their children's enthusiasm. Some have participated in interactive child-parent homework assignments; some have contacted their child's teacher when they did not receive an assignment during the course of a unit.
Teachers are energized by the experience of collaborating to develop units, by opportunities to discuss ideas and methodology with peers, by sharing materials, and often by team teaching. Music, art, and physical education teachers, who otherwise tend to operate in relative isolation, are full partners in education. During unit development, these teachers—in some cases, for the first time—are able to share insights and knowledge to vitally enrich the curriculum for children.
"In the Basic School, we're part of each other's classes, and I'm part of the school community," says Lucy Bruntjen of Mantua Elementary. "As an art teacher, I usually have to scramble to be heard, to be known. But art is valuable in this program."
Teachers have commented that the collaborative process enables them to draw on the expertise of colleagues to enhance their own skills.
"I'm a better, more integrative lesson planner," says Kristin Dreyer, a kindergarten teacher at Jackson-Keller. "I've developed into a curriculum writer and am still developing."
"I feel more like a professional," says Carol Coley, who teaches 4th grade at Jackson-Keller. "I've tried strategies and styles of teaching that I never thought I would, and they've worked for me."
These and other teachers say they can't imagine going back to fragmented teaching and isolated classrooms.
Some Basic Achievements
For the past two years, Jackson-Keller Elementary School has been designated a Recognized School for its scores on the Texas Assessment of Academic Achievement tests. At Danebo Elementary in Eugene, Oregon, reading scores are the most improved in the Bethel School District. At Willard Model School in Norfolk, Virginia, the average reading score for African American students beat the national average for all students; Willard is the only school in Norfolk with such a record. New York City's Harlem Public School 7, a new Basic School, got itself removed from the state's SURR listing (School Under Registration Review) after only one and a half years, a fraction of the time most schools need.
These examples of Network achievements reflect the overall success and recognition many Basic Schools have enjoyed for service projects, parent involvement, and technology-infused curriculum.
With the Core Commonalities as an organizing theme, children in Basic Schools acquire, store, and retrieve information much more efficiently than they would in a traditional, fragmented curriculum. The Commonalities serve as a frame of reference for children to connect learning to life.
