Online Schools - The Best Ones Have the Best Curriculum

 

I can remember about 13 years ago, sharing with my then current boss in the technology department, something that I had created using, probably Supercard at that time, that duplicated many of the same software instructional strategies found in an application the elementary schools were paying thousands of dollars to implement. I can remember my boss being impressed but then saying, why would teachers want to learn to create their own software when they could buy it from some a textbook publisher. The fact that I had created, what I’ll call a proof of concept, in little more than a week and incorporated aspects that I thought were more relative to the students in our schools was lost in the belief that most teachers didn’t have the skill, computer knowledge, or creativity to design and develop their own software. I may just caught her a little off guard with my impromptu presentation of what was capable. In either case, her comment bothered me, and 13 years later I’m hearing the same arguments when it comes to online learning. There are many reason why I think just purchasing tools from a large publisher is a bad idea and that as educational professionals, it just strikes me as ridiculous that we would even be thinking about purchasing online learning curriculum from some outside-our-community publisher.

First, teachers have been developing curriculum for their students as long as I can remember. Curriculum is not just a textbook the State has blessed for use in the classroom. Curriculum is not a program that streams over the Internet to some indiscriminate student in front of a LCD screen. Curriculum is the collections of tools that addresses a specific learning concept or goal that we have deemed important for identified unique students. It is a collection of content, strategies, practices, mistakes, and innovations on the part of the teacher and learner to construct meaning in the head of the student, and many times in the head of the teacher.  You will find no better curriculum developers, that are in touch with your community, know your students, and understand what is most important for your students to learn, than the hard working men and women in your local classrooms. These individuals have been doing this work from day one.  We should be taking advantage of these resources to develop curriculum, maximizing the new technology tools, and in the process providing avenues for looking at how school can be done better for our children. So much of what is currently available for sale by large publishers today in the online education arena is the same old classroom content that we have been creating and  using for years just snatched up, repackaged in a shiny new box, and stamped with the words “Online Learning Curriculum.” The worse we could do by developing the online curriculum ourselves is to duplicate what is currently available through the big publishers. Even then, our curriculum would be more targeted to our students and community as opposed to being created to address the widest audience possible. One other point is the fact that when commercial publishers talk about their online learning curriculum, try to pin point what percentage of the instruction is using technology and is online? How much of what they provide is actually different from a traditional face to face classroom and capitalizes and strengths of technology (communication/collaboration/creativity/development/voice/perspective/action) and how much of it is the same thing just viewed through a few thousand pixels.

 
It should not be surprising that creating curriculum for an online learning environment is not something a school district would do without cost. However, any school district that is seriously thinking about shelling out 75% or more of their ADA to commercial content provider should not be dissuaded from moving in this direction. For schools and districts that go down this road, there will be a learning curve and an initial investment of resources. It would be expected. However, successfully implementing a curriculum development process would provide the institution with advantages leaps beyond those that implement online learning programs with generic curriculum.  The best online schools will be those with the best curriculum, and those that are the most successful will have created their own curriculum.

Innovative Schools Committee - Summary

A group of teachers, administrators, and parents met over the period of a year, every three weeks, to discuss topics related to meeting the needs of the students in the Sylvan Union School District now and well into the future and provide the school board with recommendations. We brainstormed needs, and we looked at the projected trajectory of where the future is taking us, and how those needs can be addressed in light of the directions we are heading.

Initially, the needs shared numbered well over a 100 and discussions continued to define, combine, and describe them as succinctly as possible. At times, the information shared regarding our changing hyper-connected world and our steadfast educational system seemed disjoint. We struggled as a team to discover models and solutions that others have successfully implemented and may hold promise in our own. Our school district’s background has been rooted in success and achievement for students. The past models of instruction have served us and our students well to this point, and looking at some of the models left us questioning whether continuing with our current model might not be such a bad idea. However, we realize the world is changing and the demands that our world put on us are changing too. In order to server our students needs in the current world, we need to change along with it.

Our current students will be entering a world where the opportunities provided by the older system are becoming extinct. Our economy is suffering and our unemployment percentage is at about 18%. When things do improve, the jobs and needs of our world will no longer consist of those that have for so many years, been the staple of our young, educated population. In the place of those old jobs will be those that place a premium on creativity and imagination. It goes without saying that in order for our students to be successful in these core skills, they must possess a basic understanding simple principles of communication, computation, and critical thinking. We must instill in our students a desire of continual questioning and a seeking of answers, a desire for life long learning. We should never instill in our students the idea that there is a point when learning is not needed or complete. Learning is never complete and there is no end to learning.

The Innovative Schools Committee ultimately came up with 5 key recommendations. Each one was presented to the school board in subsequent board meetings this summer. They are:

1. Digital Revolution - Direct staff to create a timeline identifying strategic components and requirements necessary to provide students and schools with resources to support online instruction in blended format, alternative ed format, and accelerated instruction model.

2. Meaningful Assessments - Direct staff to keep in mind the following principles when designing and evaluating assessments:

• Know who’s learning;
• Attempt to build fun, pleasure, and satisfaction into core assessment loop;
• Change the learner assessment experience over time; a good learning experience takes the learner on a journey;
• Build assessments that reward what is learned and provide goals for improvement;
• Create assessments that clearly define paths to future goals;
• Design assessments that increase challenge and complexity: create conditions for flow;
• Provide assessments that incorporate intrinsic motivators like power, autonomy, and belonging.

3. Home/School Communication - Direct staff to create guidelines for home/school communication that account for new technologies and modern communication practices.

4. Changing Roll of Teacher - The committee asks the board to direct leadership to invest an equivalent amount of resources in the development of passionate, curious, enthusiastic, and creative staff equal to professional development in the area of academic student achievement.

*(Translation - As with students, the success of our teachers with the challenges of educating a modern population will require creativity and imagination. Without fostering those skills in ourselves, we will be at a loss of fostering those skills in our students.)

5. Global Relevance - The committee asks the board to direct staff to incorporate the five concepts shared by the Innovative Schools Committee into the work of the PLC and its charge of designing strategies that address improving student learning and our schools.

*(Translation - Global Relevance in today’s world translates into working collaboratively with your peers, whether they are in the classroom next to you or across an ocean. The initial steps to being globally relevant start very small and close to home. The PLC, Professional Learning Communities, system is the beginning of this process and fosters habits and strategies that eventually promote global relevance.)

The work of the Innovative Schools Committee and the 5 recommendations presented are by no means the end of the work. This is only the beginning of a process that will continue to evolve with the continued effort of dedicated community, educators, staff, parents and students. 

*(Image courtesy of leedsyorkshire, CreativeCommons Licensed  http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisrobertshaw/2571742452/  )