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Note: This document was originally authored as a collaboration between Todd Newby, Patricia Neuhaus, and Andrew Stillman an assignment for a course in curriculum development for aspiring school leaders at Baruch School for Public Affairs.

1) Practical implications for instructional leadership - what would it mean to work with teachers in implementing this curriculum initiative? How does it inform your perspective of quality instruction?

Implication # 1: A leader is only leading if others follow.

One of the most challenging tasks of an administrator is guiding staff members and, at times, convincing them to “buy in” to reform. To this end, staff members need to be convinced of the value of a concept-based curriculum; for that matter, staff members need to be persuaded regarding the importance of any school wide decisions. According to Erickson, “when students learn to think beyond the facts, they are able to see patterns and connections of old knowledge and new knowledge; they transfer understandings to new systems; and they systematically build conceptual depth and sophistication” (41). With a concept-based curriculum, students gain true understandings, therefore preparing them to comprehend new knowledge throughout their lives.

 

Implication # 2: The school schedule must value and provide for teacher collaboration across all disciplines.

All too often, teachers exist in vacuums, isolated from co-workers and the outside world. Consequently, students receive a disjointed education; content knowledge in different disciplines is rarely connected, and the facts and skills emphasized in school are only sporadically connected to the world of work. Erickson proposes that “by broadening the scope of basic skill applications and relating them to complex performances in working, living, and learning, students move beyond imitation and see relevance as skills are contextualized in work and family roles” (111). Learning material by rote, without understanding the value of the content, is far too often the norm in many classrooms. Instead, schools need to provide opportunities for students to develop higher-level, integrated thinking skills that are exhibited through genuine acts. It is important to note that Erickson points out that this can happen to a limited degree in traditional classroom settings, if an individual teacher designs curriculum through using a concept-based approach. However, an educational leader can provide the impetus for this type of curriculum on a schoolwide level by scheduling common planning time with the clearly defined objective of developing interdisciplinary, concept-based units.

 

Implication # 3: Alongside teachers and students, an educational leader must be a lifelong learner.

In the final chapter of the book, Erickson considers the principal’s role in the school adapting a concept-based curriculum. Erickson explains that a principal must be an informed individual who supports and understands the creation and revision of the curriculum. Adversely, “if principals bring older visions of teaching and learning to professional evaluation, they will stifle the change process” (157). A successful educational leader always stays abreast of educational trends and new approaches to teaching and assessing students. One conceptual lens across many disciplines is change; an educational leader must always be ready for change, amenable to change, and aware of change. Education, and our world, is constantly in flux. If an educational leader becomes grounded in his/her own fixed perception of curriculum, then he/she will be an impediment to creating an environment for learning that will best serve students.

 

2) Critique/questions we would like to ask the author. Modifications (and your rationale for these).

Question # 1: The approach to curriculum and instruction outlined in your text seems to be similar to that of Wiggins and McTighe in Understanding by Design. However, you use different terminology to depict similar concepts. For example, you refer to enduring understandings as macro-concepts Do you feel that your work is comparable to Wiggins and McTighe? If not, where do you feel the two diverge?

 

Question # 2: Many of your model units list five to ten “essential questions” that appear to assess knowledge of content. For example, your fifth grade unit on inter-relationships on page 121 listed ten essential questions.

Does the following question, based on the principles of Understanding by Design, capture the essence of the numerous questions you have noted?

How are community, production, economics, and technology interrelated?

In general, would your lesson plan template benefit from fewer, broader essential questions that lead students to a deeper understanding of big ideas?

 

3) Connections to self/world/text.

Text to Text Connection

Grant Wiggins' and Jay Mctighe's acclaimed "Understanding by Design" (UBD) outlines an approach to thinking about curriculum which shares Erickson's premise that core, unifying concepts and highly transferrable skills must be the locus for our planning efforts. Both Erickson's "Concept -Based Curriculum and Instruction" (CBCI) and UBD seek to combat what is portrayed as an institutionalized tendency by K-12 educators to organize themselves around the coverage of material and loosely connected "favorite" activities. Both also seek to critique and advance the national and state teaching standards movement by recentering the conversation around essential skills and understandings, as opposed to discrete content knowledge and performance objectives.

While the approaches of Erickson and UBD share many of the same assumptions and recommendations, these two approaches differ some in language and emphasis. UBD introduces the idea of backward design to mean that after a teacher has identified the desired essential skills and understandings, the main focus of instructional planning should be on designing big questions and assessments that authentically call forth and demonstrate these skills and understandings. While UBD proclaims itself to be non-linear, the "stuff" of instruction is generally to be thought about after the question of what student performances will serve as evidence of understanding. Once a culminating performance assessment task has been well articulated by the teacher, the sequence of mini-lessons, activities, and midpoint assessment can unfold naturally as scaffolds to a final performance or product.

While only subtly different, Erickson's approach places more emphasis on the development of conceptual frameworks for instruction. Sharing the UBD language "Essential Understandings" and "Essential Questions," much of Erickson's advice centers on the identification and articulation of cross-curricular themes and questions of "spiraling" complexity. While Erickson shares Wiggins and McTighe's belief in the power of authentic performance tasks which call forth complex skills that are at the heart of a discipline or profession, she focuses most of her work on presenting techniques for identifying over-arching concepts within the content, and does not ultimately give such a central role to assessment in the planning process.

 

Text- to- Text connection

Erickson's call for a new approach to designing curriculum, assessing learning and fostering student thought processes is compatible with the view of the rapidly changing world presented in Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat. Both texts emphasize that a fixed knowledge base or skill set is no longer a viable alternative for staying competitive in the global economy of the 21st century. Each passing year increases the amount of factual knowledge available to us; therefore, Erickson argues, students cannot simply memorize content anymore. Instead, Erickson suggests, “citizens need conceptual thinking abilities to understand increasingly complex social, political, and economic relationships” (67). A concepts-based approach to learning gives students a lens to incorporate new events and adapt to new situations.

Friedman emphasizes the need for students and employees to become “lifetime learners” in order to remain employable in the ultra-competitive global market. In past generations, Friedman explains, individuals were granted lifetime employment with a fixed skill set, but now the marketplace is demanding more versatility on the part of the workforce. What does this mean? Based on a conversation with technology consultants at Gartner Inc., Friedman states,

 

“Generalists have broad scope and shallow skills, enabling them to respond or act reasonably quickly but often without gaining or demonstrating the confidence of their partners or customers. Versatilists, in contrast, apply depth of skill to a progressively widening scope of situations and experiences, gaining new competencies, building relationships, and assuming new roles” (291).

Our current educational system produces students who, in the best case scenario, possess superficial understanding of a wide field of knowledge. Erickson mirrors this observation through explaining “curriculum is a mile wide and an inch deep (5). Our students are better prepared to excel in the new world through gaining true mastery of a focused, narrower content area; deep understandings are then transferable to new situations.

Erickson and Friedman are in agreement on a core principle: it is no longer enough to say, "I have learned. Now I am prepared to succeed." As educators, we must shift our paradigm to one that embraces, and communicates to students, the statement, "I know how to learn and acknowledge that I will continuously learn more to pursue success."

Text to Self/ World connection

What we often experience in our practice:

• Children are taught and held accountable for concrete facts.
• Little transference of knowledge is demonstrated from one application to another, one situation to another, or one communication partner to another.
• Information needs to taught and re-taught repeatedly.
• Mastery is never established.
• How can generalization or deep understanding be established when the language of my students remains so concrete?