Journal #10

Carpenter, David and Margaret (December/January 2008-09). All aboard! How a new curriculum-development review process brought teachers, administrators, and learning specialist to the table and resulted in some innovative uses of technology. Learning & Leading with Technology, Retrieved April 3, 2009, from http://www.iste.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=December_January_No_4_3&Template=/MembersOnly.cfm&NavMenuID=4193&ContentID=22190&DirectListComboInd=D

In order to successfully implement 21st century skills instruction, those skills must be viewed as important as other agendas. At Hong Kong International School, they were able to accomplish this by implementing a new curriculum development review process. The first step was to put teachers in charge. These days teachers have so many demands placed on them by students, parents, administrators and specialists. Instead of just adding more demands to the teachers, they were placed at the center of the curriculum-development, giving them a voice to the process. A Collaboration Team was put in to place, which was made up of teachers, learning specialists, administrators, technologist and library media specialist.

The process started out focusing on social studies and science curriculum with reading and writing to be added later. By not taking on too much in the beginning it allowed the participants to have more ownership in the process. The principal showed his buy in by providing coverage for the half or full day meetings, so the meetings didn't have to be rushed. It was also determined that a versatile online curriculum-mapping tool that contained a unit-planning template would be used. Since the specialists were already aware of the unit goals, it made it easy for them to work with the teachers to codesign the lessons that were given to the students. The librarian would recommend books, the media specialist would supply DVD's and the GATE instructor would conduct pull-out literature circles, all to help improve the instruction and enhance the students learning experience. It was important that teachers learn new technology including podcasts, mind maps and multimedia presentations so that they could be on the same page with their students and not have to use valuable classroom time. The final step to this process was to conduct an end-of-unit reflection meeting. In this meeting they reviewed student assessments, uploaded exceptional work to the curriculum-mapping tool, determined what did and didn't work and ensured accountability.

As stated in the article the key elements of the new curriculum process are as follows:

• Best practices for instructing 21st-century students in a standards-based school
• Assessment-driven curriculum improvement
• Differentiation for gifted as well as struggling students and various learning styles
• Integrated technology and information literacy skills
• Curricular decision-making documentation to meet the needs of various audiences (especially teachers new to the school, administrators, parents, and students)
• Expansion of the Collaboration Team to include learning support, ESL, and other specialists to further design the curriculum to meet the needs of all students.

Question #1 - What are some of the benefits you see of having a Collaboration Team? One of the benefits to having a Collaboration Team would be how many different ideas would be able to come to the table to be discussed and explored. I also think it's a great way to model collaboration, which is one of the things we're trying to teach our students.

Questions #2 - What are some obstacles you see that would make it difficult to implement this program? I think funding could be an obstacle as well as faculty that has not been educated and enlighten to the benefits of technology.