Accessing the Bonus Content in Your Curriculum
The more I watch teachers work this year, the more I marvel at the ways they manage to access the bonus content in their curriculum.
A curriculum is nothing more than a sequence of learning activities, right? No point in being too romantic about it. Maybe you and your department adopted one. At the start of the year, they all look roughly the same.
But at the end of the year, which of those learning activities did your students actually experience? In many classes, students access something less than the full curriculum.
No judgment. Teachers plan in response to factors like a jammed school calendar, district pacing guides, lessons that are optional or feel like they aren’t pulling their weight.
But here’s what blows my mind—in some classes, students clearly access something more than the full curriculum.
I’m not talking about the experiences teachers use to supplement their curriculum. I’m talking about bonus content in the curriculum itself, experiences that are available through the curriculum but only if teachers use ingenuity and pedagogy to unlock them.
Here is an example I observed recently from Colin Campbell of San Dimas, CA.
Colin’s students are learning from this screen in Desmos Math. It’s the curriculum. Tens of thousands of students have learned from that curriculum but Colin’s students got some bonus content.
Colin takes the aggregate view of student thinking—a summary of student thinking available only to him on the teacher dashboard—and unlocks the bonus content, asking the class to decide if that view changes or supports their answer. Later he shows a student’s response, with sketches, and asks students to analyze it.
Those questions aren’t in the curriculum—they’re bonus.
In another teacher’s hands, students might have offered those ideas for evaluation or maybe just admiration. But Campbell here has turned student ideas into more student ideas.
Good curriculum—one that is open to diverse student ideas—makes bonus content possible but only teacher pedagogy makes it available to students.
The bonus content is the kids. In the most engaging and effective classrooms, it’s increasingly clear to me that the kids—their thinking, their ideas—become the curriculum.
What Else
This demo video from Brisk AI caught my eye this week. I remain extremely pessimistic that AI will change the operation of schooling (reflected by staffing, funding, etc) in any fundamental way in the next five years, but I’m very open to enhancements to teacher working conditions. I’m especially interested in the feature in the image above, which claims to re-write articles at different reading levels, which is a core value proposition of, well, entire edtech companies.
Jennifer Carolan is the co-founder of Reach Capital, an edtech venture capital firm, which is important context for the words of caution she offers developers of edtech AI in her essay What AI Will Disrupt but Never Replace.
The new season is rolling on Math Teacher Lounge, my podcast with Bethany Lockhart Johnson. In this season, we’re researching math anxiety, its origins and remedies. We interviewed two math anxiety researchers in our first two episodes about the origins of math anxiety. And in the most recent episode we’re discussing remedies with none other than Dr. Rosemarie Truglio, the VP of curriculum at Sesame Street. Yes.
I appreciated this post from Peps Mccrea on the teacher expertise paradox. “In general, the better the teaching, the easier it looks to the outsider.” I love podcasts like Song Exploder, which deconstruct the complexity underneath even simple melodies. Or the way video series like Thinking Basketball explain the sophisticated thinking behind what might otherwise seem like chaotic movement on a basketball court. What does teaching have that’s comparable?
Okay one example maybe? Later today at 4PM Pacific, you can watch me teach a lesson on inequalities. Two of my colleagues who are very fun and very smart about teaching, María Flores-Iavarone and Kelly Serpa Howe, are going to comment over the top of it, kind of like an announcer in the booth at a football game. It was one of the hardest lessons I have taught in recent memory and I hope they take it easy on me.
My buddies over at Desmos Studio just released a new beta Geometry tool and it’s fantastic.