Values and Memes
I have been thinking about Values and PY10 and the observation from some teachers that there might be a dominance of
"middle-class values" of those consulted during the review and our subsequent documentation and thinking.
Some have asked interesting questions about recognising the the values of the full range of our students (eg generational poverty) and the complex relationship between student, teacher and community values - particularly in the context of globalisation and our location in the Asia-Pacific.
I have written something introductory about values, memes and Integral Theory in order to promote some discussion among those interested in this area...
Labels: integral, values
Gates Crashing the Curriculum Party?
America's high schools are obsolete according to Bill Gates.
“By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded...
By obsolete, I mean that our high schools – even when they’re working exactly as designed – cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.”
Through the Gates philanthropic foundation he has spent nearly
one billion dollars helping to rebuild or redesign 1500 US high schools. He doesn't claim to be an education expert but says that as head of a corporation and a foundation what he sees “leaves him appalled”.
He talks about how high schools fail to prepare most students for work, tertiary education and citizenship - because they were designed that way! He believes that in the past governments only required a small percentage of students to qualify for tertiary entrance but that today all students should do so. And he says that research has proved that all students can do so.
In his address to the recent US National Education Summit on High Schools he said that there are two arguments for better high schools:
- the economic argument - in today's global economy it hurts us if all students are not being educated
- the moral argument - we need to do something because it's hurting the students
He pointed out that as far back as 2001 India had almost a million more university graduates than the US - and that China now has twice as many graduates as the US. This puts the US behind in the international supply of knowledge workers - workers that are now only a mouse-click away.
The schools being funded by Gates are built on principles based around the “new three R’s“:
- The first R is Rigor – making sure all students are given a challenging curriculum that prepares them for college or work;
- The second R is Relevance – making sure kids have courses and projects that clearly relate to their lives and their goals;
- The third R is Relationships – making sure kids have a number of adults who know them, look out for them, and push them to achieve.
How is Australia's secondary education system hurting?
What kind of education would business interests here promote if they began to put large sums of money into secondary education?
Labels: 21stCentury, curriculum, learning
Framework Mapping
I've been playing with mapping the new curriculum framework... :-)
In this first one I have used a nested (holarchic) rather than hierarchic representation. I think holarchies better represent the notion of expansion and inclusion we might be after.
If you can't see it properly hold your mouse over it until you see the '<- expand ->' icon.
In the second version I have shaded the right hand side boxes to represent the notion that ALL stages are inclusive of ALL the curriculum principles - values to learning elements.
In the third version I have shown how extra words might be added to give some sense of the emergent whole for each level (called a holon). I am not happy with the words I have chosen but you get the idea...
The fourth version gets a bit more radical. I have changed some of the names trying to embrace different metaphors.
On this doc I have started to look at other ways of describing the Learning Elements (don't really like the word 'challenges'...) .
I have also included Professional learning because feedback was critical that teachers didn't seem to be represented. Others would say that the learning refers to boths students and teachers. Anyway... I just put it in to see what people thought.
Finally here is a version from John exploring the idea of turning the pancake diagram on its side...
What do you think? Useful? Clumsy?
Labels: conceptual frameworks, curriculum
