Anyone who has spent much time in schools has either undergone or observed the ritual of curriculum revision. Mandates or guidelines come down from the state or district or principal, and the machinery clanks into place. A committee is formed, and a schedule is drawn up. Arguments ensue. Factions arise. Horse trading occurs. Objectives are sequenced. Content is divided among grades. The document appears in teachers' mailboxes. The document disappears into desk drawers, and the textbook reappears on the desktop. Routine reigns.
On the other hand, contemporary life is seldom routine. Gigabits of information speed through glass fibers, rushing into our consciousness and accumulating by the millions of images and pages. American industry faces greater competition from overseas, and an aging population means fewer workers and creative producers.
Believing that response to these changes requires a true transformation of public education and not merely tinkering, the Virginia State Superintendent Joseph A. Spagnolo, Jr., the State Board of Education, and the Virginia Department of Education are developing a program called World Class Education. Rather than dressing up a traditional curriculum model in refurbished clothes—trying to do old things better—we wanted to help schools to see things in a new way, to try new techniques. We are currently in the second year of a 10-year plan that we hope will create an entirely new kind of school in Virginia.
Principles to Guide a New Curriculum
In 1991, when we began developing our new curriculum, we designed the following six principles to guide our changes.
First, we center on outcomes. Rather than focusing on educational inputs—how many teachers, how many library books, how many hours, how many credits—we asked ourselves this question: When the educational process was complete, was the result acceptable? The customers of public education—business, industry, the colleges, and the armed forces—say no. So, we turned our attention to real results and developed a curriculum built on students' capabilities when they walked out the school door.
The second principle says we hold schools accountable for their results, not their plans and reports. We need to transform the energy expended in satisfying the regulations that have accumulated over time into creative ways to improve outputs in each school.
The third principle is the assumption that all students can learn. In the past, schools have sorted incoming students according to perceptions about what they would be able to accomplish, reflecting an era when discrimination was acceptable and unskilled jobs were plentiful.
The fourth principle, closely related to the preceding one, states that education should emphasize the collaboration that enables students to produce high-quality results by drawing on the various strengths of team members. Although competition among companies may produce more and cheaper goods, cooperation is required among workers and thinkers to produce high-quality goods and ideas. The evolution from a polarized society to a productive and harmonious one requires cooperation among people with differing backgrounds and aims.
The fifth principle emphasizes active, constructed, and connected learning, drawn from a variety of content areas and related to real problems. The more knowledge human beings have acquired, the more arbitrary the distinctions appear among many traditional disciplines. What, for example, is economics? It is a social science, but it is also mathematics and government. Research has indicated that people do not gain knowledge or skills in isolated packets transferred verbally to the brain but learn best by practicing and trying new, useful ideas and connecting them with what they already know, in effect not acquiring knowledge but creating it (Crowell 1989).
The sixth and final principle centers on assessment that supports better teaching and learning. Educational assessment has generally depended upon one-shot performance and unambiguous answers, quite distinct from the sort of active, cooperative learning that research is showing to be most effective in developing competence and pragmatic problem solving (Johnson and Johnson 1984). Moreover, traditional tests were more useful for discriminating among students than for indicating how well they could achieve significant outcomes.
World Class Education
- Regulations related to inputs will be gradually eliminated or reduced.
- A Common Core of Learning will be developed to indicate essential outputs and to influence creative views of curriculum and instruction.
- A system of performance assessment keyed to the Common Core will replace most of the current norm-referenced testing.
- A school-based accountability program will reveal how well schools are preparing their students.
- A series of state-supported demonstration sites at selected elementary, middle, and high schools will provide other schools with information about how to transform themselves for better outcomes.
With World Class Education we hope to help schools transform themselves, not just rearrange the parts. Rather than trying to make the traditional curriculum fly higher and faster, we are radically changing what the curriculum looks like. We will relax regulations, leaving open how a school chooses to organize time, implement staffing patterns, acquire instructional materials, or set learning objectives. No decisions beyond those affecting the health and safety of the students are givens; everything may be considered and researched, tried, revised, and discarded if results are not adequate. Results matter.
Virginia's Common Core
The Common Core of Learning is the centerpiece of World Class Education, the basis for curriculum innovation and school restructuring across Virginia. State specialists, local educators, and college and national consultants spent more than a year discussing and creating the Common Core. Similar groups spent another year developing a process for setting standards based on the Common Core. A 20-page draft version distributed to teachers and schools in October 1992 sets forth 38 outcomes that students will need to perform at various levels of their education. (At present, Virginia recognizes three educational levels: early childhood, pre- and early adolescence, and adolescence.) Rather than being content-based, the Core is driven by these outcomes. The Common Core is not intended to be the state curriculum but to suggest curriculum innovation to schools that wish to change voluntarily.
- take care of themselves;
- get along productively with other people;
- learn well;
- understand and care about the pleasures bestowed by culture and the arts;
- do high-quality work;
- be well-informed and active members of the community; and
- understand, use, and preserve the natural world.
To identify probable success in each of these areas, we produced a total of 38 outcomes. For example, outcomes for the area of “high-quality work” state that a graduate will need to: (1) collaborate effectively with others, (2) anticipate and respond to change by expanding knowledge and skills, (3) create high-quality work and accept responsibility for the results, and (4) explore and employ emerging technologies. In turn, each outcome has a set of indicators for measuring student achievement of the outcome. Using appropriate content and activities, teachers will teach the ability to perform the indicators incorporated in each outcome.
We also identified a set of skills that are basic to successful performance in any area. These skills are not merely essential for a student but for a person living in the world. Each student, throughout school and in the context of every unit of instruction, needs to learn and practice thinking, problem solving, communicating, quantifying, and collaborating.
These skills are not directly addressed by the traditional curriculum. For example, the curriculum assumes that learning about the Pilgrims will eventually contribute to good citizenship, basic mathematics will enable students to balance expenses and income, and finding subjects and predicates will lead to effective writing. Too many students, however, do not turn out to be good citizens, cannot orient themselves in the real world of income and outgo, and cannot write clearly and effectively. Traditional objectives tend to be more closely related to some abstract structure of content knowledge than to successful living.
In Virginia's Common Core, both the outcomes and the fundamental skills can transform learning because they teach performances required for life. Although voting for a candidate for public office has little meaning for a young child, this child can learn to participate in public affairs by seeing a community problem, thinking about its causes and possible solutions, and communicating these ideas to appropriate people. Throughout schooling, the student learns more and more about how society and government function and continues to practice increasingly sophisticated and effective ways of participating in public life.
Putting the Plan Into Practice
To implement the Common Core, we plan to use demonstration schools; 10 to 15 elementary schools will be chosen as transformation project sites. Change will not be mandated; people react with enough understandable confusion and turmoil when creativity is just encouraged. A third of Virginia's schools are now deciding whether to participate as demonstration schools. The selected schools will receive extra state funding for a year of planning and then a year of changing, with the understanding that they will then share what they have learned with other schools in the area. The same process will later be used in middle schools and high schools.
The schools chosen will focus upon a well-conceptualized, research-based program of change. Implementation will be school-by-school, with each school being transformed in its own way. Programs may include interdisciplinary teaching and learning, changes to the school schedule, interaction with the community through mentors or volunteers, cooperative learning, curriculum development, and a program for 4-year-olds. All substantive changes must stem from or be related to implementation of the Virginia Common Core of Learning. By keeping a record of plans, research, modifications, ideas that worked, and ideas that didn't, schools will provide the information base for other schools as they restructure.
To help schools implement the Common Core, the State Department of Education has established a Users' Guide Team and a Staff Development Team. In May 1993, the Users' Guide Team will distribute a handbook that will suggest some theoretical change processes and steps that schools can take to translate the outcomes of the Core into content and program standards. Later editions of the “Users' Guide to the Common Core” will include actual accounts, validated processes, and usable models drawn from the transformation sites. The Staff Development Team is working on materials linked to the Guide that will help schools see how to build the necessary bridges between the known and the needed.
Our challenge is to give schools the right amount of information to spark creative approaches that are at least near the target of the Common Core. At the same time, we must give assessment designers enough domain and performance information to ensure validity and reliability. Developing such standards is a real test of any educator's flexibility, commitment to change, trust in others, and patience.
More Authentic Assessment
If the curriculum outcomes are pointed toward real life, then assessment must also be more authentic than it traditionally has been. Thus, Virginia is designing a unique process for student assessment to support school transformation. We will establish regional development centers, supported largely by local staff. Teachers from surrounding districts will come to the regional center to learn how to design their own classroom-based performance assessments, focusing on every student, that support both the Common Core and their schools' curriculums. More than any other activity, designing assessment creates a deep understanding of what needs to be taught and how to teach it best. This activity will infuse the Common Core into schools and provide an expanding cadre of teachers who are knowledgeable about curriculum and assessment. The knowledge these teachers have acquired can then be used in implementing the state-designed assessment model.
As the Common Core is developed, Virginia will also begin a new statewide assessment system that will depend less on norm-referenced measures and more on various sorts of performance assessment that attempt to incorporate realistic tasks keyed to Common Core outcomes. Because World Class Education emphasizes school accountability, we will do much of the statewide assessment on a sampling basis to determine how each school's students are performing on a range of outcomes. Whether the testing will be done on a random basis or on a selected group of students is still being decided. Focusing on the school rather than on each student means that more outcomes can be assessed without increasing the amount of time spent on testing.
Improvement in the American public school system will require a substantial transformation in how schools do business. The process will be supported by better management techniques and technology, but the transformation will be led by real change in curriculum and instruction.
The change will not be easy; we must move beyond the content compromises of the past. Real transformation requires a vision of what students' lives will be like when we are gone. Put new teachers, new materials, new technology, new assessments, and new methods into old curriculums and schools and the new soon resembles the old. But if educators and parents struggle with the issues and implications of a truly new curriculum, any school may create the kind of learning we must have to survive and prosper.
