When my daughter, Colleen, is 25 she will email me a
picture of herself on a beach South of Barcelona. She will be pointing at a pod of dolphins
splashing in the sandy shallows of the brilliant blue Mediterranean. The email will also include a link to a news
article about her boss at some European Union summit. There will be a snapshot of two official-looking
older people shaking hands and smiling at the camera. Colleen will be in the background, smartly
dressed and holding a briefcase. She
will be staring at the gilded wainscoting with her mouth slightly open. I will laugh at the picture. I will also be slightly annoyed that she won’t
make it home for Christmas.
My three children; Colleen 14, Morgan 4, & Quinn almost 2 |
Colleen is currently fourteen years old and a freshman in
high school. I have 10 ½ years to get
her from our little town in Alaska to where I want to see her when she’s
25. 3 ½ really as there won’t be a whole
lot I can do to influence her decisions after she graduates from high
school. Other than hope that everything I've taught her has sunk in.
In education this idea of getting your kids where you
want to see them is called “backwards design.”
Rather than plugging along at the curriculum, doing what you think you
ought to be doing, then testing on the material that you’ve covered, you decide
your objective first. What do you want
your kids to know or, more importantly, what do you want your kids to be able
to do? After you’ve decided your
objective, you decide how you will assess
or test whether or not your kids can do what you want them to do. Then you figure out how to get them to that point.
Pile of building materials that randomly & holistically morphed into a 5 room, 32x20, 2-story addition to our home. Not. |
Think about this in terms of building a house. One does not start with a pile of materials
and begin randomly hammering & sawing, hoping for the best. If that technique is used, one can imagine
that a significant amount of time would be spent fixing problems that you,
yourself created through lack of foresight.
Believe me, I’m in the process of building a house, I know. The smart (and usual) way to go about
constructing something is to plan first, then draw up your materials list, then
begin, using your plans, measuring twice before cutting.
As I begin my teaching residency at a local high school,
I have been following the backwards design rule religiously. I’m a whiz at looking up national, state,
Common Core, cultural, and district standards to figure out how to decide what my kids need to do/know. Then I dig through the internet and my
methods text to decide how they will
prove to me that I have been successful in my teaching. Then I will design a series of lessons/steps
to get us to where we need to be by the end of the unit.
I have been particularly inspired by a Christmas present
to myself, Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World by Heidi Hayes Jacobs. I ran across the title while doing some
shopping on Amazon and found her ideas and writing style instantly engrossing. Her work with curriculum innovation and the Common
Core State Standards is doing a lot to bring the United States’ education system out of the
1800’s and into the 2000’s. A
particularly enjoy how she has declared war on the #2 pencil.
I have heard a lot about “traditional” skills and
knowledge but since the threat of the end of the Mayan calendar has now passed,
I’m hoping that more people will embrace the idea that our children’s future is
uncertain. I’m hoping that they will
stop doing them a disservice by hobbling them, ensuring that they will be unable
to compete in the Global Market with some kid in India who lives in a cardboard
box but knows how to create a podcast.
Tony Wagner’s The GlobalAchievement Gap does a fair job of explaining how our pigheaded faith inThe Three “R’s” is rendering us obsolete.
I would like to make it very plain that my audience here
is not a community of educators. They’ve
heard all of this. They know what they
should be doing and if they aren’t doing it, they are ignoring that Educational
Psychology class they took way back before they got their license. They are ignoring every inservice they’ve
ever been to. And, perhaps worst of all,
they have not spend any time on the website of George Lucas’ beautiful
non-profit, Edutopia. So, basically,
they don’t give a damn about your kids. If they aren’t trying their hardest to
implement 21st Century education into their school.
My audience here is parents. Yes.
That’s right. You. Mom and Dad, Auntie, Uncle, Grandma, Grandpa,
Foster whatever… Whoever out there who
is responsible for feeding and clothing a child is also responsible for
educating them.
What are the schools for, you ask? The schools are there to do what YOU tell
them to do. Look around at successful
schools and school districts. Are they
filled with children whose parents don’t give a damn about education? No.
They have parents who are the squeaky wheels. The “helicopter parents” who advocate,
oversee, and, basically, make the lives of the principals, superintendents, and
school board members a living hell if the educational needs of their children
are not met.
Keeping in mind that most educators have invested the
same amount of time and money into their own education as your average doctor
or lawyer and, therefore, have some level of expertise in their field which
should be acknowledged if not respected; parents, ultimately, know what is best
for their kids, or they would, if they paid a bit of attention to what is going
on in the world.
Sound a bit harsh?
Good.
Backwards design works as well in parenting as it does in
teaching. Ask yourself, “Where do I want
my kid to be in 10 years, 20, 30?” “How
do I want them to live?” “What
opportunities do I want them to have?”
Of COURSE you can’t plan your kids’ life out to the last detail but
using the “they will rebel and do what they want anyway” line is about the biggest
cop-out on the planet.
I know it’s hard.
Who can see the future? But aside
from being good, moral, compassionate individuals, your kids are going to need
to know a lot more than how to tie their shoes.
So get to it.
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