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scope and sequence
By audhill | July 19, 2007
I read Miguel Guhlin’s post today. As many of the innovators in tech ed seem to be doing lately, he struggles with his frustration at the slowness with which the educational bureaucracy takes on the new. This was my response:
Digital storytelling, podcasts and global projects are great tools and wonderful ways of involving students in intrinsically rewarding learning. I want to do digital storytelling and journalistic blogging and all of the interesting stuff in my classroom, because it’s got merit. I know I learned more about writing as arts editor on my college paper than I did in 4 years of college classes; it stands to reason so will they.
BUT.. I believe in balancing the board. I’m frustrated with the fact that educators ignore the decline in standards when they talk about what needs to change in education. I want to hear tech leaders coming out for the use of technology in the classroom AND scope and sequence. Our kids aren’t languishing in a dry world built from unresponsive scope and sequence. Scope and sequence, sad to say, is exactly what kids HAVEN’T been getting for the last 20 years of innovative. Instead, we’ve had wave after wave of let us entertain them education. The problem isn’t same old same old. The problem is that standards in education were thrown out the window with bankrupt theories designed to blur disparities in performance among the haves and have nots. I hate NCLB, but coming from 6 years in the NYC public schools before moving out, I remember what a content empty summer camp it really was.
I say go the way of the taoists. Advocate the simple, practical way. Create a foundation for children by re-establishing a viable and coherent scope and sequence, challenge them rather than make them comfortable in 7th grade with the same texts they were able to read in 4th grade, give them education that is replete with intrinsic reward and insure that it is responsive to new paradigms of 21st century society. But, let us please stop pitting one good thing against another.
ps. What percentage of the student population do you think is using their communication tools to talk about calculus and physics? But, anyway… for those who are… The reason their college educated parents may find the physics and calculus conversations over their heads is that the college kids who graduated during the 70s and 80s graduated from schools that had jettisoned standards for science and math literacy. They could easily graduate with one course in business math and a science class called euphemistically physics for poets. In my view, it’s just another argument for bringing some standards back to education.
Topics: edtech |