Synthesizing Education

It is rather intriguing to look around the world of education and listen to the varying beliefs on “what” should be taught in schools. Curriculum is always a favorite target of mine, and many of you who read my work regularly know my feelings on our inflated, overstuffed, irrelevant curricula that emphasize a need to know factoids rather than develop higher-level thinking (please see The Ugly Truth of What We Teach in Schools and Educating With the Big Three). I also find it refreshing that mainstream society is beginning to question the validity of the overstuffed curriculum and the effect that they are having on the physical health and cognitive development of our kids. In addition to adults voicing disgust over the way courses are designed, kids are beginning to make rationale decisions about whether or not traditional components of schooling, like Advanced Placement courses, are more important than learning to think deeply and critically about topics. There is only one way that we can realign our curricula so that educator’s across the board are emphasizing teaching kids how to think rather than what to think.

Educators need to sit down, reflect, and think about what aspects of their courses are the most important. Organizations like the College Board need to develop clear goals for their AP courses and consider the feasibility of kids achieving those goals within the eight-month time frame of the course as people, rather than widgets. The long-term effects that current models of AP courses have on student health must be called into question.

Personally, I don’t even consider AP courses to be all that rigorous. If, by rigor, we mean that students must memorize tons of factoids that they then forget a day after the exam then, of course, AP classes are challenging. The questions we are asking should be: what are the students really being challenged by, and what role will it play in their future?

What I suggest is a new paradigm for how we view rigor in K-12 classrooms: sustainability of knowledge. Curricula should be looked at as a “system” of child development through school. Are kids being taught topics, ideas, and skills that build on each other during their 13 years of schooling and emphasize sustainable knowledge instead of “one-hit-wonders”?

Rather than writing curriculum that focuses on content and have critical thinking built into them, we should flip their focus and place the emphasis on developing higher-order thinking skills with only relevant topics included. Students will still take United States History I (for example) in tenth grade, but the focus will be on adding relevance to the topics covered as well as developing the ability to synthesize information across a variety of disciplines. Currently, our model works in reverse. Teachers work at a feverish pace to cover content a mile wide and an inch thick. The emphasis is on getting kids to learn content information; not build critical thinking skills.

In addition, this type of “flipped” implementation allows for common tends to occur across grades so that students are learning to develop critical thinking skills, revisit them year after year, and, as a result, learning knowledge and skills that they can carry throughout the rest of his/her life.

The new curriculum format will place the emphasis on development of cognitive abilities rather than memorization of content knowledge. The content knowledge becomes a byproduct of the unit similar to the way that critical thinking is enacted now. All districts should generate guides that are aligned vertically and horizontally so that students are working on the same critical thinking skills (e.g. evaluation) in every class thereby resulting in an increase in their transfer of knowledge.

We cannot continue down the path we currently travel. Students are coming away without the ability to think, synthesize information, and transfer their knowledge to other facets of life. No subject should be viewed as an island. “Flipping” curriculum guides to emphasize the skills that are most important to the futures of students will force us to realign our values in education and develop assessments that more accurately reflect student cognitive development rather than rote memorization without applicability.

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