Curriculum Innovation Quotes

Making across the curriculum means students as novelists, mathematicians, historians, composers, artists, engineers—rather than being the recipients of instruction.

a large-scale policy mandating a mono-cultural curriculum – focused on teaching to the job may very well create a society of trained workers; but it will fail at creating a learning society. If we want to maintain a position of being inventive and vibrant and robust, we need an inventive, vibrant and robust educational philosophy. Just as teaching to the test distorts the learning process in ways that are often directly in opposition to the desired outcomes of the test, a teaching policy aimed at jobs alone may very well end up destroying jobs, or at the very least compromising a truly innovative culture.

private school teachers tend to have fewer credentials and to cling to traditional teaching styles, such as lecturing while students sit in rows and take notes. Public school teachers, by contrast, are much more likely to be certified, to hold higher degrees, and to embrace research-based innovations in curriculum and pedagogy

His special gift was the ability to see the essence of a worthwhile suggestion and to relate it to what was already in existence or planned. Then he would encourage and shape the new project, repeatedly redesigning the curriculum so that a new department or course could have a comfortable place in which to grow and offer it benefits.

the selling of curriculum materials of a more general nature is a substantial business in itself. A captive audience of more than 40 million school children is attractive to all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons. The susceptibility of educators to such fasionable “innovations” is what opens the floodgates to permit the intrusion of such programs into the public schools. This susceptibility is only partly spontaneous.

The word curriculum originated in the 1600s as a derivative of the Latin word for “course,” specifically a course for a horse or chariot race. That’s a far cry from the stuffy academic flavor the word carries today. Before it was used in formal education, curriculum referred to the necessary stages of development children go through on their way to adulthood. And before it evolved into a rigid syllabus of assignments and tests, a curriculum was a series of tasks and experiences designed to take someone on a journey toward maturity.

Fourth, we must integrate the curriculum by using a common descriptive language for innovation. There is no point in teaching a liberal arts and sciences curriculum that continues to fragment knowledge and creates specialists who cannot communicate across disciplinary lines. Education must focus on the trunk of the tree of knowledge, revealing the ways in which the branches, twigs, and leaves all emerge from a common core. Tools for thinking stem from this core, providing a common language with which practitioners in different fields may share their experience of the process of innovation and discover links between their creative activities. When the same terms are employed across the curriculum, students begin to link different subjects and classes.

I adored my best friend. Reyna Vargas was the most genuine, kindhearted person I’d ever met. I’d felt an urgent need to take her under my wing the first day she joined our school at the start of senior year. She was so soft-spoken and delicate that she would need protection if she was going to survive the hallways of Xavier Catholic School, where privilege was the backbone of the curriculum and the air itself was infused with the fresh leather scent of entitlement. The kids at my school were carbon copies of their CEO fathers and corporate counsel mothers. They’d been trained since birth to smell blood in the water from a mile away. Xavier bullies could teach the CIA innovative new torture tactics. Reyna had been a brand-new shiny target in a plaid pleated skirt until I took her in my arms and claimed her. No one at school had dared touch her after that.

• Launched Real Time Talent, one of the most innovative workforce development initiatives in the country. It links the curriculum and training for more than four hundred thousand postsecondary students with the skill requirements of employers in the state (RealTimeTalentMN.org). • Created the Business Bridge, which facilitates connections between the procurement functions of large corporations and smaller potential suppliers located in the region. As a result of this effort, participating businesses added more than $1 billion to their spending with local businesses in two years—a year ahead of their goal. • Helped to build the case for investing more aggressively in higher education. By strengthening relationships between business and higher education leaders, and using a fact-based set of findings to justify investing more than an incremental amount, a coalition organized by Itasca helped increase spending in the state by more than $250 million annually. That’s not bad for a group of people with no budget, no office, no charter, virtually no Internet presence, virtually no staff—but a huge abundance of trust.

How insightful of Finland to devise a topic-based curriculum in their schools! This means that dicreet "subjects" that are taught may cross-fertilise each other, and the possibilities in this are amazing!

The quality of students wasn’t an issue; Tsinghua and nearby Peking University attracted the highest-scoring students from each year’s national examinations. But the SEM’s curriculum and teaching methods were dated, and new faculty members were needed. To be a world-class school required world-class professors, but many instructors, holdovers from a bygone era, knew little about markets or modern business practices. The school’s teaching was largely confined to economic theory, which wasn’t very practical. China needed corporate leaders, not Marxist theoreticians, and Tsinghua’s curriculum placed too little emphasis on such critical areas as finance, marketing, strategy, and organization. The way I see it, a business education should be as much vocational as academic. Teaching business is like teaching medicine: theory is important, but hands-on practice is essential. Medical students learn from cadavers and hospital rounds; business students learn from case studies—a method pioneered more than a century ago by Harvard Business School that engages students in analyzing complex real-life dilemmas faced by actual companies and executives. Tsinghua’s method of instruction, like too much of China’s educational system, relied on rote learning—lectures, memorization, and written tests—and did not foster innovative, interactive approaches to problem solving. Students needed to know how to work as part of a team—a critical lesson in China, where getting people to work collaboratively can be difficult. At Harvard Business School we weren’t told the “right” or “wrong” answers but were encouraged to think for ourselves and defend our ideas before our peers and our at-times-intimidating professors. This helped hone my analytical skills and confidence, and I believed a similar approach would help Chinese students.

First, national standards and national curriculum, enforced by high-stakes testing, can at best teach students what is prescribed by the curriculum and expected by the standards. This system fails to expose students to content and skills in other areas. As a result, students talented in other areas never have the opportunity to discover those talents. Students with broader interests are discouraged, not rewarded. The system results in a population with similar skills in a narrow spectrum of talents. But especially in today's society, innovation and creativity are needed in many areas, some as yet undiscovered. Innovation and creativity come from cross-fertilization across different disciplines. A narrow educational experience hardly provides children opportunities to examine an issue from multiple disciplines.

This technocratic–instrumental perspective on teaching and teacher learning has advocated deference to so-called educational experts, a teacher-proofing of the curriculum, and a devaluing of teachers’ own innovations and decisionmaking in their classrooms (Herrera & Murry, 2016; Jackson, 2015; Leopard, 2013).

David DeHaven blends education and technology expertise to empower faculty, optimize curriculum, and champion innovative teaching methods, enhancing higher education's impact.

The head of research for Sesame Street in the early years was a psychologist from Oregon, Ed Palmer, whose specialty was the use of television as a teaching tool. When the Children's Television Workshop was founded in the late 1960s, Palmer was a natural recruit. “I was the only academic they could find doing research on children's TV,” he says, with a laugh. Palmer was given the task of finding out whether the elaborate educational curriculum that had been devised for Sesame Street by its academic-advisers was actually reaching the show's viewers. It was a critical task. There are those involved with Sesame Street who say, in fact, that without Ed Palmer the show would never have lasted through the first season. Palmer's innovation was something he called the Distracter. He would play an episode of Sesame Street on a television monitor, and then run a slide show on a screen next to it, showing a new slide every seven and a half seconds. “We had the most varied set of slides we could imagine,” said Palmer. “We would have a body riding down the street with his arms out, a picture of a tall building, a leaf floating through ripples of water, a rainbow, a picture taken through a microscope, an Escher drawing. Anything to be novel, that was the idea.” Preschoolers would then be brought into the room, two at a time, and told to watch the television show. Palmer and his assistants would sit slightly to the side, with a pencil and paper, quietly noting when the children were watching Sesame Street and when they lost interest and looked, instead, at the slide show. Every time the slide changed, Palmer and his assistants would make a new notation, so that by the end of the show they had an almost second-by-second account of what parts of the episode being tested managed to hold the viewers' attention and what parts did not. The Distracter was a stickiness machine. “We'd take that big-sized chart paper, two by three feet, and tape several of those sheets together,” Palmer says. "We had data points, remember, for every seven and a half seconds, which comes to close to four hundred data points for a single program, and we'd connect all those points with a red line so it would look like a stock market report from Wall Street. It might plummet or gradually decline, and we'd say whoa, what's going on here. At other times it might hug the very top of the chart and we'd say, wow, that segment's really grabbing the attention of the kids. We tabulated those Distracter scores in percentages. We'd have up to 100 percent sometimes. The average attention for most shows was around 85 to 90 percent. If the producers got that, they were happy. If they got around fifty, they'd go back to the drawing board.

In contrast, an educational approach is heavily front-loaded. It expects people to work through a curriculum or set of experiences to be certified as spiritually mature or ready for leadership.

What Is Your Philosophy of Discipleship and Leadership Training? The fourth key question is, “How do you think people are best trained to live out the Christian life and best prepared for leadership?” Your answer should ideally be reflected in the curriculum you choose, the way you structure your meetings, and the way you train your leaders.

Innovations are happening in conventional schooling. Some people will read the chapters to come and respond that their own children’s schools are incorporating evidence-based changes, making them more like Montessori schools—eliminating grades, combining ages, using a lot of group work, and so on. One could take the view that over the years, conventional schooling has gradually been discovering and incorporating many of the principles that Dr. Montessori discovered in the first half of the 20th century. However, although schooling is changing, those changes are often relatively superficial. A professor of education might develop a new reading or math program that is then adopted with great fanfare by a few school systems, but the curricular change is minute relative to the entire curriculum, and the Lockean model of the child and the factory structure of the school environment still underlie most of the child’s school day and year. “Adding new ‘techniques’ to the classroom does not lead to the developmental of a coherent philosophy. For example, adding the technique of having children work in ‘co-operative learning’ teams is quite different than a system in which collaboration is inherent in the structure” (Rogoff, Turkanis, & Bartlett, 2001, p. 13). Although small changes are made reflecting newer research on how children learn, particularly in good neighborhood elementary schools, most of the time, in most U.S. schools, conventional structures predominate (Hiebert, 1999; McCaslin et al., 2006; NICHD, 2005; Stigler, Gallimore, & Hiebert, 2000), and observers rate most classes to be low in quality (Weiss, Pasley, Smith, Banilower, & Heck, 2003). Superficial insertions of research-supported methods do not penetrate the underlying models on which are schools are based. Deeper change, implementing more realistic models of the child and the school, is necessary to improve schooling. How can we know what those new models should be? As in medicine, where there have been increasing calls for using research results to inform patient treatments, education reform must more thoroughly and deeply implement what the evidence indicates will work best. This has been advocated repeatedly over the years, even by Thorndike. Certainly more and more researchers, educators, and policy makers are heeding the call to take an evidence-based stance on education. Yet the changes made thus far in response to these calls have not managed to address to the fundamental problems of the poor models. The time has come for rethinking education, making it evidence based from the ground up, beginning with the child and the conditions under which children thrive. Considered en masse, the evidence from psychological research suggests truly radical change is needed to provide children with a form of schooling that will optimize their social and cognitive development. A better form of schooling will change the Lockean model of the child and the factory structure on which our schools are built into something radically different and much better suited to how children actually learn.