Now that the school year is coming to a close, I'm starting to reflect on the year as a whole, what I will keep the same and what I'll change. This year was a big step forward for me in terms of curriculum development. I created a standards-based curriculum in which I analyzed the learning …
Category: Curriculum
Memorization in Moderation
In grad school, we focused a lot of attention on what Paulo Friere - one of the all-stars of educational philosophy - calls the "banking model" of education and, specifically, how to avoid treating students like "empty vessels" within which we as teachers simply disperse knowledge. With this mindset, I entered my first year of …
An In-Depth Look at the Year Outline
A couple weeks ago, I explained how I came to use the English Anchors as the "backbone" of my curriculum planning. In this follow up post, I'm going to dig into the details of this outline and explain why and how I mapped it out as I did. It isn't totally finished, but it's bound to …
Curriculum Writing for English
Last year, I found out I was going to have a job as a full-time teacher two weeks before the school year started. I outlined my curriculum as much as possible, but these outlining sessions didn't produce more than a few pages of random notes. With the school year quickly approaching, I fell back on the …
Learning and Teaching in the Modern Age 