Big Ideas in Education Blog

Tag: curriculum

  • 5 Steps for Planning the Big Ideas in Education – with Pokemon Go

    Always start with the Big Ideas in education when you plan your days, weeks, units, and years.  Avoid starting with Pokemon Go. When you start with the technology, you risk gaps in learning – lest your practice become about the tool and not the curriculum for student achievement. Does this mean not to use Technologies…

  • The Underlying Stories we tell in Education

    There are underlying stories that come to life when we look at what we teach and why we teach it. We as educators choose who will speak, what information will be highlighted, how the curriculum will come to life. We essentially choose what underlying stories we will tell when we choose whose voices will prevail. …

  • 14 Considerations for Inquiry Based Learning

      Inquiry is essential. The fact is that students come to school with partial knowledges.  But the curriculum documents themselves do not address the parts that students know or don’t know. It has been built to present to us about the privileged people and only the most successful moments in history according to those people.…

  • In support of Libraries for Academic Success & Equity

    In support of Libraries for Academic Success & Equity

    Libraries are essential in building academic success and equity in our schools and learning environments. This is very easy when staff and students come from similar backgrounds and share similar languages, experiences and expectations. But what about the ‘others’? The one’s who do not share similar experiences, expectations, languages, and backgrounds? First, what does it…

  • Equity in Assessment

    Equity in Assessment

    Research on multicultural groups including Black, Hispanic, First Nation, and ESL suggests that standards based reforms, large scale assessments, implementation of standards based reforms are unfair (Volante, 2008). We run into problems when the big data is always used to prove what works in education, for instance, why we need Librarians, more standardized texts for…

  • Teacher Moderation & Assessment in the age of Knowledge and Innovation

    Teacher Moderation & Assessment in the age of Knowledge and Innovation

    I think it behooves us to ask ourselves whether collaborative assessment practices including moderation, is different now that we are headed into 2016 – versus what it looked like in 2006? The process of grading and assessing students is very subjective, and it always has been – but with so much information, technology, globalization, opportunities…

  • ‘Quiet’? or ‘Conversational’ Classrooms

    ‘Quiet’? or ‘Conversational’ Classrooms

    The term ‘Quiet’ in our traditional school classrooms, often equates to ‘compliance’. This was very important when our traditional school system was built over 100 years ago. It was essential that we had compliance from our students to adequately train them for the industrial era. When I think of quiet classrooms, I think about the…

  • Is Curriculum a Living Organism, or a Fixed Machine?

    Is Curriculum a Living Organism, or a Fixed Machine?

    Is Curriculum a Living Organism, or a Fixed Machine? The world is changing rapidly. Just think about how we have moved from an Industrial revolution, to a knowledge economy that requires new skill sets. Knowledge is being built and re-built and changed on a daily basis. Facts can be looked up on the internet. Therefore,…