Open Educator's Back to School 2007 Newsletter
Start the new school year off right by starting a new curriculum team, or joining an existing team!
We at Open Educator believe that to become more effective, reflective practitioners, teachers must engage with other educators in pedagogical discussion, and become "open planners": revealing ourselves--strengths and weaknesses--and our long term vision for where we want our students to go. Our Open Planner course design template asks the kinds of questions that we think push educators to carefully consider the map of their instruction. It takes a great deal of thought and effort to get through these questions, but once answered, the school year now has a clear focus, a purpose, a strategic way of improving instruction. For those of you who have yet to start a new project or join a team, the guiding questions are as follows:
- Essential Understandings, Skills, and Discipline-Specific Habits of Mind: How do you think knowledge is constructed in this discipline or sub-discipline? What skills and big picture ideas are requisite for expertise in this realm of knowledge? Less is more!
- Pedagogical Stance: How will this curriculum promote the development of the above skills, understandings, or habits? What are the most common preconceptions specific to this subject matter that students bring into the learning process? How will this curriculum address these? What experiential resources might students possess that will aid the adoption of these new understandings? How will this curriculum utilize these?
- Supporting Research: What educational research supports the adoption of a curriculum that takes these pedagogical and/or epistemological approaches? Provide a brief synopsis of the existing corpus of evidence with links, if this exists. If limited research currently exists, describe an action research plan that will enable you and others to assess the value of this instructional methodology.
- Common Unit Structure: What patterns and rituals will punctuate and motivate the movement of learning in this curriculum? Is there a learning cycle? A project-driven structure? A skills/content-driven cycle?
- Action Research Tools (optional): What measurement tools can educators use to quantify the relative success of this curriculum in their classrooms?
As you start the new year and start designing your courses, we hope that you will take the opportunity to use a new school year as the perfect excuse to start planning everything on-line, openly, working with others on perfecting the learning process, figuring out how to teach better as part of the Open Planner community.
A sampling of our teams...
Below is a sample of teams that have already been created, and are open for any Open Planner member to join. These may be of interest to you, or to one of your colleagues. To join, you must be logged in to the site. Click "subscribe" on the team's home page. Click here to view a complete list of our planning teams.
Open Planner Book Club
A group formed to outline and discuss the curriculum implications of books presenting research and best-practices.
High School Government Curriculum Writing Team
A team of high school government teachers dedicated to improving civic education.
"Law Debate" High School Curriculum Writing Team
Law Debate is a course designed to give high schools students the skills to prepare for and conduct mock civil and criminal trials.
Hawai'i Traditional Medical Institute
An institute for traditional healers and integrated medical practitioners.
Lastly, some exciting new ESL curriculum planning projects have been developed this summer by students at Teachers' College, Tokyo
- Second language Teaching through Art
- The use of listening strategy
- Research & Presentation Curriculum for Middle and High School Students
- Global Village: Think Globally, Act locally
- TESOL through Movies
- Homestay English
- English Learning through Pop Culture
We're looking for a lawyer and an accountant to serve on our Board of Directors
Our nascent board is still in need of some key skills: lawyering and accounting. If you know a lawyer or an accountant who resides in the New York City metropolitan area, and who would be interested in serving on our board, please contact Jennifer Stillman at jennifer@openeducator.org. Learn more about who already sits on our board.
New features you may not have noticed:
New introductory tutorials and help topics. Using Open Planner, our curriculum portal, definitely takes some time to master. We've added some additional help topics to guide new users through the learning curve.
Team planning templates: You can now create a standard structure for your unit overviews and lessons. Templates enable teams to easily share common curriculum design structures as they collaborate on projects. Create a new planning template by clicking "create planning template in the left sidebar of a team home page in which you are a member.
Help us create more Open Educators: Forward this newsletter to a colleague whose work you admire!
To build our nascent community, we need our early members to act as proselytizers. Sermons during faculty meetings about the benefits of open curriculum would be great, but we'd settle for a quick email to another educator whose wisdom would enhance our collective planning and add to the fun mix we've already got going.