Just had a wonderful weekend of volleyball at ISHCMC with the U14 MRISA tournament. Everything ran very smoothly despite the heavy rain with is a tribute to Matt, Phatt and the team of helpers.
During that last few weeks I have been interviewing both leavers and new staff. It has been a very formative experience and I have thoroughly enjoyed the time that I have spent with each and everyone one of them. I am looking forward to the last few interviews in the next two weeks. It has been very pleasing to see the engagement with our mission and the concept that the school needs to change if it is to adequately prepare students for their future. It is clear that this understanding is deeply embedded in many of your minds. Hence, following a couple of conversations about the potential importance of learning skills over concepts and content I thought I'd share this article that was sent to me recently about , A Curriculum for Changing the World as well as some connected thinking that links with AtL's as well as Global Citizenship for this week's Food for Thought.
This is an attempt by educators from Harvard's school of education to create a curriculum that attempts to change the world by focusing on skills and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals established in 2015.
"In Empowering Global Citizens: A World Course, Fernando Reimers and four co-authors offer an interdisciplinary K-12 curriculum that aims for nothing less. It seeks to develop the specific cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal competencies crucial to thriving in the 21st century. Among those skills: the social and emotional ability to understand and work with people from diverse cultures; the creativity to develop sustainable solutions to complex problems; and a sense of confidence that individuals can (and are obligated to) make a difference.
A Global Curriculum
A curriculum, ideally, should give young people the knowledge they need to approach the future with a dynamic, accountable, forward-thinking mindset, says Reimers, the faculty director of international education policy at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The World Course is a curriculum specifically designed with the future in view — with the idea that our future will be an interconnected one, with complex challenges that demand a sense of citizenship and collaboration that expands beyond national borders"
Becoming familiar with 'The Empowering Global Citizens curriculum' would certainly provided a good scope and sequence for skills that we should be embedding in our IB curriculums. There is no doubt to me that many of the aspects of this curriculum have been taken from IB thinking and that we do already cover them but without them being systematized or recorded. The underlying pedagogy fits perfectly with what we do, inquiry, project based learning and authentic assessment based around tackling global issues. Perhaps what we need to be doing in the future is starting our planning with the AtL's and skills and then moving to concepts and finally associated content. I know that groups of you have been focusing on skills through Grade level discussions and the AtL committee but having this fully scoped and sequenced from Early Explorers to Grade 12 would allow us to confidently say we have prepared our students to function and learn no matter what the world looks like in 2029.
I have purchased this book and another called 60 lessons for Empowering Global Citizens and hope to be sharing with you at the start of next year because it is published under a creative commons license.
The IB is a good minimum framework for what we need to be be doing but we need to take this skeleton and build upon it so that can be confident about the learning skills that ecah and every student has been taught by the end of an ISHCMC education. Building upon the Empowering Global Citizens Curriculum here is another similar view to the direction that we need to be building our education around. I am sure that many of you are familiar with this diagram from the Partnership for 21st Century Learning. If you have not been thinking about the implicit development of skills through your teaching this link to P21 will introduce you to their framework and some useful resources and support materials for planning next year. By going here you can download the framework and its definition.
Finally, a short TED about the importance of sleep for adolescent students. It is important for all of you to watch and understand so that we all have the same elevator pitch in the future when we introduce a later starting time for secondary students than primary. Our goal will be that Primary stays as it is today and Secondary moves to, at the earliest, a 9 o'clock registration/ advisory period. There will be parents who object to this start time because it doesn't fit with their schedule and search out allies on the staff so it is important that we are all aware of the key arguments and how they relate to the well being of the adolescents in our care.
Have a good Sunday,
Yours
Adrian
Hi,
ReplyDeleteIt's really nice.
Andaman White Beach Resort