Current Trends in Elementary Education

First I want to begin by speaking about the Kiran Bir Sethl video that we were asked to watch. Wow! So simple and so powerful. There were a few key phrases that jumped out at me while I was listening:
* blur the boundaries between school and life
* aware, enable, empower
* i can
* children as protaganists
* you have got to believe....you can

All of these things are so simple yet form the foundation of a very powerful curriculum that engages students and provides in depth learning experiences that are meaningful. I hope our education system can aspire to be this.

The article Elementary Education: Current Trends from Answers.com left me with many things to think about and many things that made me stew. The beginning of the article mentioned how local and national attention on elementary schools continues to be directed at making an education system that is educative, meaningful and positive. My first thought is how can learning be meaningful is all that we are doing is testing. That isn't meaningful or positive. It is an education in how to take a test. It also mentioned how our schools still resemble the "vernacular of colonial America." How can this be a good thing? It's a little concerning that our schools still resemble those schools. I think the basics of some of those schools were sound and important, but we should be much further along.

The article gave a new definition of curriculum I had not previously seen, "Curriculum may be looked at as a negotiated set of beliefs about what students should know or be able to do." My first response in my notes was, "Hmmm...." I am still not sure what to make of it, but it is giving me something more to think about. It also goes on to mention the current testing environment and standards based movement that some people in the business world think that this testing is necessary to make sure that all children master at least the basic essentials. I immediately cringed at this because they aren't mastering anything except how to take a test. Mastery learning occurs when the learning experience is meaningful and mastery involved higher level thinking. Mastery is not memorization.

I could go on and on. There was mention of poor student performance as being a failure of the education system, the idea that 87% of all U.S. teachers believe the standards movement is movement in the right direction, the immigrant population and how this effects our education system, all of which I had some thoughts on, but I will stop.

I'm not sure where we are supposed to mention the article we found about current trends in curriculum in elementary education, but I am posting the link of my article here: http://www.ecs.org/html/offsite.asp?document=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.edexcellence.net%2Fdoc%2FMoats2007.pdf

This is a fascinating article about the movement in reading toward "scientifically-based" reading instruction as a better and more "proven" method toward the instruction of reading. It is interesting the number of schools abandoning their own curricula for these "scientifically-based" basal reader programs with their scripts and assessments. This is a movement I don't support and this article provides more information about this.