I’ve been involved with a lot of great conversations lately about curriculum and the learning that is happening at our school, it’s very exciting! The work we’ve done with our middle school curriculum team and in departments this year has been tremendous; we’ve made great strides to put crucial pieces of the puzzle in place. One of the pieces that excites me most is that we’ve moved from a model where we had been saying, “Hey, this is a great school, send your kid here and trust us!” to a place where we can now say, “You can expect your student to learn these things in school, here they are and here’s the map.” For a lot of schools/teachers this may seem like a small thing but for all of us here who know the journey we’ve been on to get to this point this is a HUGE celebration!
As we know, there is still a lot of work to do and there always will be, this is an ongoing process. We’ll continue to work in departments to improve our curriculum and I’d like you to think about what your work with our students really means. So, this week I’ll put a few questions out for you to ponder as we embark on the fourth quarter down hill run to June. All of these questions stem from Making Thinking Visible, the book we gave you earlier in the year.
- What kinds of thinking do expect your students to engage in while in your classroom?
- How do you force your students to think in this way in each and every class?
- What evidence do you have that shows that (or more importantly HOW) your students are indeed thinking in the desired manner?
Let me know what you think. This is a very interesting topic to me and I would love to hear your two cents!
Pushing Forward 