UPDATE: Cool. This post was nominated and made the shortlist for Most Influential Post of 2012 by edublog. I’m really honored!
What if the earth moves and the sun is at rest? What if gravity is just a special case of space-time? Following both counter-intuitive premises revolutionized science and ushered in the modern world. Could a similar counter-intuitive thought experiment advance education from where I believe we are currently stuck? I believe so.
The educational thought experiment I wish to undertake concerns curriculum. Not the specific content of curriculum, but the idea of curriculum, what any curriculum is, regardless of subject. Like Copernicus, I propose that for the sake of better results we need to turn conventional wisdom on it is head: let’s see what results if we think of action, not knowledge, as the essence of an education; let’s see what results from thinking of future ability, not knowledge of the past, as the core; let’s see what follows, therefore, from thinking of content knowledge as neither the aim of curriculum nor the key building blocks of it but as the offshoot of learning to do things now and for the future.
In our own era, this may seem to some as nutty as Copernicus’ idea must have seemed. For over a thousand years a formal curriculum has been conceived of as an organized and logically-sequenced march from the basics to advanced knowledge. Well, of course: whether we are Professors of Physics or third-grade teachers, when we develop a syllabus and lessons we consider the most important topics, and we then devise a sequence by which they are ordered and addressed via instruction. By this means we parcel out learning in clear and logically-sequenced elements. We design backward from human knowledge, in other words, and we sequence knowledge in ways that suit the learner’s prior and current knowledge. What else could a curriculum be?
Well, this works fine if the present is just like the past; if ideas turn into competent action automatically; and if theory, not effects, matters most. Alas, each notion stopped being thought of as true in the time of Copernicus. That’s why folks like Comenius, Rousseau, Spencer, Dewey, Bruner, and Toffler have been arguing for fundamental change over the last 300 years – not in the ‘content’ but in the very meaning of education and thus curriculum.
So, suppose knowledge is not the goal of education. Rather, suppose today’s content knowledge is an offshoot of successful ongoing learning in a changing world – in which ‘learning’ means ‘learning to perform in the world.’
As odd as that might sound for academics, it makes perfect sense in our everyday lives. The point of child-rearing, cooking, teaching, soccer, music, business, or architecture is not ‘knowledge’; rather, knowledge is the growing (and ever-changing) residue of the main activity of trying to perform well for real.
In athletics this is very clear: the game is the curriculum; the game is the teacher. And each game is different (even as helpful patterns emerge). Knowledge about the game is secondary, an offshoot of learning to play the game well. As I learn to play, knowledge – about rules, strategy, and technique – accrues, but it is not the point.
So, it would be very foolish to learn soccer (or child-rearing or music or how to cook) in lectures. This reverses cause and effect, and loses sight of purpose. Could it be the same for history, math, and science learning? Only blind habit keeps us from exploring this obvious logic. The point is to do new things with content, not simply know what others know – in any field.
The Copernican hypothesis eventually made sense because it did two things: made better sense of the data, and dealt with increasingly embarrassing anomalies in the Ptolemaic view. Similarly for my theory: thinking of knowledge as an offshoot and performance as primary helps us make sense of current oddities and failures in schooling. For example, boredom is rampant in schools; perhaps it is the inevitable result of focusing on knowledge instead of performance (which is inherently more engaging). Forgetfulness is constant: students rarely recall what was taught a few weeks ago. How can content move from short-term to long-term memory if there is always more content to memorize tomorrow? And test results reveal over and over that few students can transfer learning to new challenges and overcome basic misconceptions. What do these unending “discrepant phenomena” tell us–if we would only attend to them?
Video games are especially startling from the perspective of conventional views of curriculum and instruction. According to the standard view, I should never be able to learn and greatly improve at the games since there is no formal and explicit curriculum framed by knowledge, and – even more puzzling – no one teaches me anything! I shouldn’t learn but I do. In games (and in life), I begin with performance challenges, not technical knowledge. I receive no upfront teaching (or even manuals any more in games and other software!) but I learn based on the attempts to perform and feedback from trying – just as I did when learning to walk or hold a spoon. How is that possible? Conventional views of curriculum and instruction have no good explanation for it.
So, perhaps our ‘crazy’ thought experiment has promise.
What else might follow from thinking of performance, not knowledge, as the aim of education? We might finally realize the absurdity of marching through textbooks. You want to learn English or be a historian? You would think it very foolish if I said: OK, sit down and let’s march for years through a dictionary or an encyclopedia, A to Z. Yet, that is basically what textbooks do: march through content, logically organized. Want to learn to cook? Read the Joy of Cooking all the way through its 700+ pages – before ever setting foot in a kitchen??? Yet, this is what we do and have always done in conventional textbook and lecture-driven schooling. It is also absurd to teach novices lots of technical jargon upfront, as if that will somehow have meaning and stick for later use. Yet, from Friday vocab. quizzes to almost all tests terminology is an absurdly major focus. We must only still do it, like medieval monks, if at some level we still think that giving things names and possessing plus appreciating (eternal?) knowledge is the point of education.
Beyond these examples of transformed curriculum, there are other reasons for declaring that all conventional curriculum-writing is badly misguided and is doomed to fail the moment we frame it backward from topics and content instead of performance. The following questions are suggestive:
- If curriculum is a tour through what is known, how is knowledge ever advanced?
- If learning requires a didactic march through content, why are movies and stories so memorable – often, more memorable than classes we once took?
- If a primary goal of education is high-level performance in the world going forward, how can marching through old knowledge out of context optimally prepare us to perform?
- If education is about having core knowledge, and we are more and more teaching and testing all this knowledge, why are results on tests like NAEP so universally poor, showing that over decades American students have not progressed much beyond basic “plug and chug”?
A revealing shift in the winds has in fact occurred in our era in professional education. In medicine, engineering, business, and law courses are no longer built backward from content. They are built backward from key performances and problems in the fields. Problem-based learning and the case method not only challenge the conventional paradigm but suggest that K-12 education is increasingly out of touch with genuine trends for the better in education.
The thought experiment I propose is not new, as suggested by the reference to Dewey and to the case method in law – both over 100 years old. As in the history of science, this idea of designing backward from the ability to use content well for worthy present and future purposes has lurked under the surface or in pockets of the medieval paradigm that still dominates curriculum for centuries. All one has to do is read Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” and the Dialogues more generally, Kant’s criticism of conventional education, Rousseau’s Emile, Hegel’s Phenomenology, dozens of books from the Progressive era in the 1920s – 30s, Piaget on what mental growth demands educationally, Bruner’s Process of Education, the recent book Shop Class As Soulcraft, as well as current research on student misconceptions and their persistence to see perpetual papered-over weaknesses in the standard view and the promise in alternate conceptions.
Back to Tyler, everyone. A key person in the Progressive era was Ralph Tyler, the Director of Research for what came to be called the 8-Year Study – a major investigation, funded by the Carnegie Foundation, into the effects of progressive education. Tyler went on a few years later to write the modern classic text on curriculum-framing (based on his work as Director of Evaluation for the 8-Year Study) entitled The Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction. Yet, in spite of the book’s success – it is still widely read in graduate courses – Tyler’s rejection of the standard view of curriculum continues to be ignored.
He was quite blunt about the error of conventional curriculum: “it is clear that a statement of objectives in terms of content headings…is not a satisfactory basis for guiding the further development of the curriculum.” The critique resulted from a premise about the aim of education (since curriculum is the formal path by which we achieve our educational aims). What is the aim of any curriculum? According to Tyler, the general aim is “to bring about significant changes in students’ patterns of behavior.” In other words, though we often lose sight of this basic fact, the point of learning is not just to know things but to be a different person – more mature, more wise, more self-disciplined, more effective, and more productive in the broadest sense. Knowledge is an indicator of educational success, not the aim. Thus, the conventional view of curriculum and the process of conventional curriculum writing must be wrong:
“The purpose of a statement of objectives is to indicate the kinds of changes in the student to be brought about so that the instructional activities can be planned and developed in a way likely to attain these objectives; that is to bring about these changes in students. Hence it is clear that a statement of objectives in terms of content headings…is not a satisfactory basis for guiding the further development of the curriculum. The most useful form for stating objectives is to express them in terms which identify both the kind of behavior to be developed in the student and the … area of life which this behavior is to operate.” pp. 45-7.
So, let’s re-consider Tyler’s claim. Let’s follow the logic, since it holds out some promise of solving vexing and persistent problems of boredom and ineffectiveness that we see daily.
108 Responses
Brilliant! I won’t say that I don’t remember anything from third grade; much of the content is likely there but I would guess that I really learned it when I put it to use in later years, not when I was sitting at the desk, reading about it. I remember vividly the goals of my Super Mario Brothers game though and could teach you, today, how to achieve them despite not having held the controller for many years. The problem-based learning approach came to mind as I read through this and you reference it later. It might be the popular instructional strategy that is most relevant here, but you imply that it doesn’t exactly fit. I know little about the problem-based learning approach outside of what intuition tells me. Can you recommend any good sources for learning more about it and how to impliment in a middle school math class?
On the contrary, I heavily endorse problem-based learning for the reasons articulated: that’s the action math courses are supposedly seek to get us better at though they so rarely do. Read my earlier post on Exeter and its completely problem-based learning in math. Also, look at the resources from the Illinois and NC math and science schools.
Hi Grant- Really enjoyed reading your article. If you’re not already familiar with behavior analytic approaches to instruction, I recommend reading about them. Designing instruction based on the outcome performances (i.e., applications) is what we behavior analysts have been doing for some 60 years. One of the seminal texts is B.F. Skinner’s “Technology of Teaching” and there have been many other good books on the subject since then.
I’m always fascinated by what a battle it is to get teachers to write learning objectives that describe the performance in context that is desired. I cringe at the number of so-called objectives that are stated as “the student will understand…” and the equally bad “the teacher will present.”
Thanks for sharing,
Karen Mahon
Thanks for the tip. I of course know Skinner’s work well (and the work of Mager and others who built off it) but I confess that many of the behaviorists i have encountered have an impoverished view of outcomes. There is a tendency to be reductionist and assume that the whole equals the sum of the parts. That is not how transfer works, of course.
Regarding the place of problem-based learning in K-12:
David Hestenes is widely known for his modeling theory of physics education (which is being expanded to other high school sciences and math) . In several publications but especially in “Modeling Games in the Newtonian World” (1992), he poses model-based learning as of central importance in science. (Download it at http://modeling.asu.edu/R&E/Research.html )
As he says, “one model solves an infinite number of problems.”
“The model(s) should guide the projects.”
Model-based learning gives a powerful theoretical foundation for problem-based learning and project-based learning.
Brant Hinrichs, a physics professor at Drury College, uses Modeling Instruction. He added: “the key is to have several modeling cycles under one’s belt before doing a project so that all the power of modeling (models, whiteboards, whole group discussions, multiple representations, etc.) can be employed in the solving of the problem.”
I am of course very familiar with David’s work, both because of my long-time interest in and reporting on the Force Concept Inventory but through my friendship with Eric Mazur. I did not know, however, how far back the emphasis on modeling in games went – thanks for the tip!
You wrote, “the point of learning is not just to know things but to be a different person – more mature, more wise, more self-disciplined, more effective, and more productive”.
We agree. David Hestenes addressed this question in a lecture that he gave to 40 high school physics teachers in a Leadership Modeling Workshop (summer 1997 at Arizona State University). Below is a quote from him.
Jane Jackson, Co-Director, Modeling Instruction Program, ASU
“A GENERAL CAPABILITY FOR DAILY LIFE: The Modeling Method is aimed at engaging students in scientific discourse – teaching them to talk about things in a scientific way! An important task for everyone in society is to formulate and evaluate scientific claims. How do you formulate a scientific claim clearly? How do you evaluate it? This, of course, is something we want students to be able to do in daily LIFE! They need a general ability to evaluate people’s claims in life situations. But before you can evaluate a claim, you must express it clearly! From the modeling point of view, we use MODELS to evaluate claims. Accordingly, students are taught about
1) models, to formulate and evaluate scientific claims,
2) methods to investigate the applicability of these models,
3) data, to evaluate the models and hence the claims.
All of this is aimed at justified belief! We want students to take responsibility for their own knowledge. That means, instead of asking the teacher, that they must be able to come up with their OWN arguments.”
“Students and teachers should be talking about this explicitly in class. If they want to protect themselves from the unjustified claims that pervade our society, if they want to function as intelligent, responsible members of the society, they need the capacity to make judgments on their own; they need an ability to evaluate evidence. That includes understanding STANDARDS of evidence. That will help them ascertain whether someone who claims he’s an expert really IS an expert.”
Ref. Hestenes lectures, Part 3: SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE: A CRUCIAL OBJECTIVE OF TEACHING. Download at http://modeling.asu.edu/modeling-HS.html . Click on “Hestenes lectures — 3. Improving Student Discourse”.
I think it is important to also remember that we now have amazing tools to reference content “on demand.” Such tools render the memorization of content virtually useless. Of course there will always be pieces of knowledge that you will need to have handy, but the list of these items dwindles each day. Schools and libraries used to be the places where information “lived.” Now information “lives everywhere” and we need to help our kids actually USE it in exciting situations. Great post!
Supporting your statements above, take a look at this video: http://youtu.be/-P2PGGeTOA4 or search “Dan Brown An open letter to educators” on youtube.
Thank you Mr. Wiggins. As I read your post the title slowly changed in my mind to “Everything you fought to put in your curriculum is right. Really.”
I teach a course called “Engineering Design” at a high school in Queens, NY. I created the course with just this argument in mind. I teach three long-term projects per year and focus on solving problems (through engineering), project management, collaboration, productive use of technology, research, and professional style writing– all performances. The only content in my course is the content needed to complete the three projects, which are flexible depending on interest and skill level of the class.
Often, I find myself questioning my curriculum design (http://goo.gl/jllri). Why don’t I add some more physics or math? Shouldn’t I give a test on the content? Should I have them memorize the different fields of engineering? It’s hard to say no to these questions with so few other teachers I know doing what I do.
Thank you for bringing your experience, research, eloquence, and of course your big name (sorry) to the defense of my curriculum. I plan to, with your permission, send many a colleague and parent to this post.
P.S. One more thanks for the mention of my alma mater NC School of Science and Math, a great school that had a big part in making me the teacher I am today.
Don’t let the bstrds get you down. It has been a fight for me all my years, going back to the 70s when I had to defend my courses. Keep the faith!
All sustained, change-inducing creativity involves a degree of self-doubt and sometimes even self-loathing. When it comes to how you teach this is enough to put most teachers off change. I back, and salute, your efforts.
Thanks for stating the issue this way. My students always put great effort into all the project based learning that they do and comment on it positively years later. I just wish I had the time and inspiration to make their classroom experience all about the experience, not about the recall. The projects are what we all remember, it is. The application that inspires a sense of purpose in the learner. We all know why we want to learn how to ride a bike and what we have to do to get there. The information cannot be gleaned from a textbook.
Agreed. The design science and art, though, is to make sure that learning of important stuff is cleverly wrapped into the project. i have seen many cool projects that yielded minimal long-term transferable skill and understanding. That’s really a key reason why UbD came into being.
[…] background-position: 50% 0px; background-color:#222222; background-repeat : repeat; } grantwiggins.wordpress.com – Today, 6:10 […]
[…] Grant Wiggins: Granted, but… Everything you know about curriculum may be wrong. Really. http://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/everything-you-know-about-curriculum-may-be-wrong-real… […]
We discussed your article at length today, Grant. One teacher wondered if this meant you no longer believed in backwards design. I stated that I thought you were trying to say we need to change what we backwards design FROM; that the end goal is performance at the ‘game’ we are teaching.
Another teacher thought you meant we should have our students explore chemistry ‘MacGyver’ like.
Another teacher placed all his faith in having the right learning goals and teaching explicitly to them.
Still another teacher stated they don’t trust game-education analogies; stating that watching a soccer game is enough to understand the basics of how to play.
How would you respond? What can move the conversation forward? I know we all want the best for our students, but what is that & how do we know it?
Well, there is much more to be said, alas. I would certainly agree with what you stated: the issue is what we design backward from. The point I was making is best illustrated by music and sports: you design backward from performing with content, not content; you design backward from transfer, not recall; you design backward from higher-order challenges that require a repertoire not lower-ordersimple out of context exercises.
I would indeed teach chemistry through forensics – there are plenty of successful experiments with that all over the country, thanks to CSI and such.
Consider any problem-based curriculum in science or medicine: you design backward from interesting and revealing problems that make the content worth learning and give it a meaningful context. This is now the way med. school is done, and the revolution occurred in 2 generations – unthinkably fast, given the history of education.
The analogy is not an analogy: the challenge is to learn to do something not learn stuff that others use in doing something. It’s like saying we’d rather lecture about soccer form the sidelines as they watch others play it than have them learn to play it. It’s why immersion in foreign language works far better than 4 years of HS French.
Easiest way to move the conversation forward? Ask the question: we teach this; what is it good for? What can you do with it that’s worth learning to do?
School is boring; that is a fact. I am asking us to face the facts instead of making another century of excesses that it has always been done this way. And now better ways exist.
“It’s like saying we’d rather lecture about soccer form the sidelines as they watch others play it than have them learn to play it.”
I guess it is both. General speaking a rough division like 90% of the time playing, 10% on the sidelines watching others. And there are some students who learn best by first watching and watching and watching. And when these students are invited to play, they will perform remarkable well.
That may be true but that is not my point. The point is that the goal is soccer playing – that’s what you design backward from, not ‘knowledge’ of the facts, skills, and rules of soccer. Academic courses are designed for would-be spectators of others’ performance which is utterly counter-productive to producing would-be performers.
For the past eight years I have supported my son in a Suzuki cello program. This work has been particularly interesting to me as an English teacher. The educational experience in this setting has been rather extraordinary for many reasons, not least of which is that it’s one-on-one, so my son’s needs and challenges are foremost throughout his lessons. That is important to remember when I compare all that he has learned to what happens in group settings. I am in awe of how Dr. Suzuki designed the scope and sequence of the program — how the very first pieces Alex learned are still taken advantage of when he is learning a new rhythm or a new bowing technique, for example. Further, the constant modeling the teacher does throughout the lesson and the ongoing imitation that the student does right after the teacher has demonstrated are excellent, and every week I watch extraordinary learning taking place. The use of repetition is highly evident and the careful isolation of particularly hard passages, which are skillfully broken down and then pursued with repetition to master them. We also videotape the lessons, which enables my son to watch them and re-think what his teacher has covered and to watch her doing the things he is working on and sometimes struggling with. (I am thrilled to see more use of video in lots of classrooms than ever before, although I think it has to be used in tandem with active exercises for digesting whatever is being covered — as we do with the cello lesson videos.) The videos also enable me to watch them and help Alex make detailed practice notes. Given the complexity of what he is now doing, it would be impossible for me to take such notes during the lesson. Finally, I feel compelled to add that a certain amount of content knowledge of music history and music theory has been essential, but it’s all been delivered in an active and engaging context — e.g. explaining features of a particular period in music, giving the background of a piece so that Alex can figure out well what the style of his playing should be, and then, of course, the incredible complexities of music theory and having that information inform his work on pieces. I should add that he took a musicianship class that had a dull and tedious lecture format, and I thought it was simply tragic that such mind-numbing pedagogy was destroying all the possibilities for what should have been exciting and engaging — as well as essential to the students’ grasp of key material that matters for their playing and understanding of their pieces. I do think, though, that some of the lively stories of the composers and also some of such cellists as Yo Yo Ma, which our teachers tells Alex (while he passively listens), have been entirely interesting to him, although he is not active when listening to such narratives. I think there is a place for such listening and that it, too, can be fascinating and intriguing to children. For example, my younger son and I are listening to THE STORY OF THE WORLD FOR THE CLASSICAL CHILD in the car when we commute to his school, and he loves it. Perhaps, though, this kind of storytelling and listening to it is engaging when there is a larger context into which it fits? My experience with the Suzuki program has informed my work as a teacher. I’d love to see someone — maybe it could be me! — strive to take advantage of what Suzuki did in other contexts.
Susan: This is a fascinating and well-written story. Thanks so much for taking the time to share it. I have always thought that Suzuki was onto something when I first encountered it as a parent years ago. Fortunately, you have taken the time to help us understand what the methods are in a transferable way: clear modeling, rapid cycles of model-try-listen-refine; use of video; use of targeted telling and stories; repetition; breaking down and putting together of hard parts; etc. I would love to see you write this up further! I would happily have you guest blog it, if you’d like – my readers would be very interested.
Reblogged this on prenwick and commented:
Several years ago, Westfield High School was in a consortium to transform schools. I deeply admire Grant Wiggins and believe in his methodology. This article is provocative, not surprisingly. I will reread several times to fully understand and evaluate his basic premise.
Hi Grant,
I agree with your article and the UdB approach.
When I checked out the UdB template you co-authored ( http://www.grantwiggins.org/documents/UbDQuikvue1005.pdf ), I was struck with the association I had with the first picture on page 1. The way the figures are seated do so strongly represent traditional curriculum design that, for me, this picture contradicts your message.
Just wanted to let you know.
Greetings,
Crystal Sharp
Thanks for that heads up. The little figures were the only free educational clip art I could find years ago! But, right you are – I don’t use them any more.
A really interesting analysis of some curricula. your vision of a future focused, non-knowledge-based curriculum is already reflected in the development of the New Zealand National Curriculum. This curriculum focuses on overarching Principles, a national vision, values, key competencies and effective pedagogies. Schools (our schools are aelf managed) use this framework to develop their own curriculum. The emphasis is on students developing the competencies they need to become ‘confident, connected, actively involved, lifelong learners. http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/Curriculum-documents This curriculum is lauded internationally and as a facilitator providing PLD for teachers and school leaders in the NZ Curriculum, I am seeing some very powerful and deep learning as schools develop authentic contexts to drive their students’ learning. Our fight now is to make sure that the incredibly unpopular (amongst educationalists) National Standards introduced by the Government don’t derail the implementation of one of the world’s most exciting curriculum developments.
Fantastic, this is exactly how we’re approaching teaching kids digital skills, in a game called Massively Minecraft. And it works so much better than what we’ve been doing in ‘curriculum’ and ‘elearning’ for the last 5 years. Great thought piece.
Love to know more – can you provide a link and some info?
MINECRAFT is the name of the game (sandbox-open ended) http://www.minecraft.net/
MASSIVELY MINECRAFT is the name of an Australia based learning community using the game: http://massivelyminecraft.org/
[…] background-position: 50% 0px; background-color:#222222; background-repeat : no-repeat; } grantwiggins.wordpress.com – Today, 1:36 […]
[…] Everything you know about curriculum may be wrong. Really. Share/Bookmark […]
[…] A provocative and lengthy post by Grant Wiggins (of UbD fame) rocked the IB world this week — in a good way. Read more about why everything you know about curriculum could be wrong. […]
[…] background-position: 50% 0px; background-color:#222222; background-repeat : no-repeat; } grantwiggins.wordpress.com – Today, 11:32 […]
Reblogged this on Things I grab, motley collection .
[…] background-color:#13151b; background-repeat : no-repeat; } grantwiggins.wordpress.com – Today, 3:29 […]
[…] background-position: 50% 0px; background-color:#222222; background-repeat : no-repeat; } grantwiggins.wordpress.com – Today, 4:38 […]
Thanks for the inspiration Grant! Just in the past week I’ve sat down with collegues and begun redefining my entire classroom to focus on skills and process objectives, rather than content. Will be tough to switch to an entire focus of inquiry driving skills, with content being the ‘byproduct’, but a task that excites me to teach again as I head into my 2nd decade of the profession.
We started with the question, “what if students were given the ability to select the objectives they want to demonstrate, and the way in which they demonstrate them?” hopefully this will help the boredom, and help them learn from an early age to identify skills they need to learn, and how to scaffold, their own learning.
Your outline of reasons is a clear reference to help guide the process forward!
Certainly enjoyed reading this post and the comments that followed and agree absolutely that content can no longer be the goal of curriculum. However, as Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It’s pretty hard to teach history ‘in game’ although the game I guess, becomes ‘research, review and reinact/judge’. I was talking to someone really interesting last week who shared a view that state education had gone through three stages; Obedience – around the start of the industrial revolution – where you respect people senior to you regardless of how they behave; Conformance – between the two world wars up until today in most parts of the world – where you conform you’re looked after (i.e. get good grades and good, safe, secure work will follow); then Independence – now and the immediate future – where people learn to become autonomous, self-sufficient, collaborative and creative. To a certain extent, curriculum is necessary for stages 1&2 as they are very much national state orientated processes providing people who form small cogs in big machines. Is curriculum necessary in the future of independence? A ‘conformance’ system worked perfectly (well, better than it does now) when we had a proficient welfare state and jobs for life. Since information is everywhere at the touch of a few buttons and production of necessities (food, water etc) is so refined that in the developed world it requires a fractional % of human activity to run we’re at a bit of a loss to find our own place and ‘be someone’. I’d say a truly revolutionary approach would be to share the ‘necessity’ work out so that we all do say 2-4hours a week of it and leave the rest of our time to do our own thing – arts/literature/music etc just generally inventing??!
I plan to reply to this at length in my next post, by sketching out how the ‘troublesome’ subjects – history, math, since – need to be reconceived to honor the points i am making. But here is a hint: ask kids to START a history course by doing an oral history of a recent local event (could even be intra-mural event). Then use that to raise questions about WHOSE story? How credible is the source? How do we deal with inconsistencies in the accounts? etc.
2nd idea: Begin with a present issue – Obamacare as ‘socialism’, the fight over deficits and entitlements – and go back in time rather than start in a distant arbitrary past that has no meaning to anyone today. Focus on the key performances of ‘doing’ history (digging for facts, finding credible sources, telling a credible story, etc.)
None of my ideas here are new, either: there were plenty of similar ventures in history in the 30s and 60s building off the same premise. Check out Fenton’s work in the 60s, for example. Start by reading the Bradley Report on reform of history, arguably the best of the initial school-reform documents from 25 years ago.
I love the article and love the concept. Perhaps this is where the concept of practical knowledge comes from.
I read Polyani decades ago and thought he was onto something, but it seemed too abstract and too focused on the tacit knowledge part of things. The work by Lave in the 70s and 80s underscored what Piaget learned late in life that while we may be average in school we can be operating at high levels of cognition in situated performance. (But beware conflating hands-on with minds-on learning).
[…] to persuade effectively, and to communicate well. That’s what we need to be doing. Grant Wiggins asks us So, suppose knowledge is not the goal of education. Rather, suppose today’s content knowledge is […]
I am now going to read your piece on Exeter and problem based math. That flies in the face of the new innovation in education which I saw on 60 minutes a few weeks ago: The Khan Academy!
You miss my point – the videos are lousy. The concept is vital: what’s the best use of class time? NOT information dissemination. That’s my only point about Khan.
Grant, thanks for writing and sharing this fantastically well written article: it is a pleasure to read something that uses both passion and research to make a clear point. I really believe in the power of such posts to change the collective mindset of educators, and hopefully lead to a bottom-up revolution. I am certainly trying to pursue such aims in my own classroom, and had to smile at some of the similarities in the thought process behind your post and one I wrote last week (http://rossparker.org/education-revolution/)…admittedly, I did not quite reach your level of thoroughness, cogency and back-story ; )
I believe wisdom — the discerning application of knowledge — is the outcome of a life of learning.
Knowledge acquisition is a key perequisite, but the development of systems intelligence, seeing how all the pieces fit together, is what make knowledge valuable.
We can model an ecosystem perspective in all we do as parents, educators, and mentors.
Curricula can, and should, reflect the desire to make connections between chunks knowledge.
[…] woke up to this article in my Facebook newsfeed. A couple of teachers that I highly regard thought it was important enough […]
[…] Everything you know about curriculum may be wrong. Really. « Granted, but… […]
[…] Could a similar counter-intuitive thought experiment advance education from where I believe we are currently stuck? I believe so. Everything you know about curriculum may be wrong. Really. « Granted, but… […]
Thanks, Grant. I used some of this with my UNB students – They cheered!
[…] background-position: 50% 0px; background-color:#222222; background-repeat : no-repeat; } grantwiggins.wordpress.com (via @timbuckteeth) – Today, 7:14 […]
Sounds like a good idea. Curricula are just races to run anyway.
Fun is much less racist: http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Subversive.pdf
[…] on education by Grant Wiggins: Everything you know about curriculum may be wrong. Really. So, suppose knowledge is not the goal of education. Rather, suppose today’s content knowledge is […]
“The educational thought experiment I wish to undertake concerns curriculum. Not the specific content of curriculum, but the idea of curriculum, what any curriculum is, regardless of subject. Like Copernicus, I propose that for the sake of better results we need to turn conventional wisdom on it is head: let’s see what results if we think of action, not knowledge, as the essence of an education; let’s see what results from thinking of future ability, not knowledge of the past, as the core; let’s see what follows, therefore, from thinking of content knowledge as neither the aim of curriculum nor the key building blocks of it but as the offshoot of learning to do things now and for the future.”
Have you ever been in a Career Technical Education class?
It’s all about “application and action”……
I don’t think you get my pointer I have not made myself clear here – I am of course well aware of such courses. But even many of those courses are not focussed on future transfer, innovation, and dynamic sequence that suits such learning. I am talking about the goals and flow of such courses, not the more obvious fact that courses need to focus on competencies. In fact, many of those courses are poorly sequenced and not focused on strategic use of skill (as opposed to marching through specific skills and small exercises).
Simple example: I worked at a voc-tech HS in NY at a BOCES where the graphics design teacher had never had students bid on jobs and work with clients. When he started to do so, he didn’t prepare students for the most basic audience/purpose issue: giving tyne client multiple design ideas to react to, to better know the client’s desires/tastes. Instead each kid worked very hard on 1 design, and were disappointed to have the client not like it. That’s just a simple illustration of a more general problem: learning that is not iterative and dynamic instead of linear; learning that is not authentic even though it is hands on.
I have been living proof that this is the case throughout my life. One of the things that drove me out of the education discipline is the way it has been practiced for far too long. I had the “Tell them what you are going to teach them, teach, then tell them what you taught them.” theory drummed into my head for four years. This is an unavoidable race to the bottom if I ever heard one. The most important learning that I have experienced comes from somewhere beyond the classroom and far outside the strictly designed curricula used to “impart knowledge”. I appreciate the way you have elucidated the concepts that have guided my teaching and learning throughout my life. I hope that others are able to understand and utilize your ideas, and mine in the development of more meaningful educational experiences for all students. Lord and Lady both know we need them!
Grant,
Very well said, and hopefully a thread that will draw significant discussion. I have been working with others around the country who also believe that we have to stop nibbling at the edges and develop very fundamental changes which, for the most part, take us right back to Progressive roots. The model of learning is just wrong and we need to paint a new picture. We are in the process of writing a book to this effect; if I can get an email address for you I would be happy to share our introduction and thesis; I think it would resonate a LOT with you. I will forward your article via link in my next post.
gwiggins at authenticeducation.org (broken up to foil the spammers).
Dr. Wiggins,
I so enjoy your posts and wonder if this latest post is describing Constructivism?
No, it’s not describing constructivism. It is asking people to pull together what we know about how people learn (of which constructivism is only a part) and what we face in terms of 21st century goals (utterly unpredictable future, and the need to innovate) into a different kind of course that prepares people to transfer their learning in any novel future situation – and that we design both learning activities and sequence backward from that goal and those truths about learning. More in my next post.
Thanks. Looking forward to the post:)
[…] Gillingham of the Parker Lower School forwarded me an article by Grant Wiggins yesterday, in which he so clearly articulates the need to shift from content-based learning to a […]
Thank you for eloquently putting into words what I’ve felt is true since I became a teacher 8 years ago. I am a former engineer, and what I know — really know — are those things I’ve done myself. So I endeavor to have my 9th grade physics students working on some kind of activity or problem project every day. But there are 24 students with a wide range of abilities in my class, and this complexity exhausts me. I don’t know how teachers with 30+ students manage.
I try to do the same with my 11th & 12th grade (IB) students, but they have to pass a high-stakes test at the end of 2 years, so we have to spend time drilling sample test questions. The ultimate goal of students and families in our high school is to get to into a prestigious college. Therefore there is a lot of pressure on students to cram for tests, like the SAT, IB papers, and AP exams, and there is a lot of pressure on me from admin and parents to “help” their kids cram too. I saw “Race To Nowhere” last year, and the message resonated with me. Our school even held a private screening last year, but nothing has changed.
A couple questions if I might:
Does PBL imply an upper limit to class size? If so is there a magic number ?
When will a portfolio replace the report card? When will colleges see value in HS students doing project work? If they don’t, what motivation is there for high schools to change?
(OK, that more than a couple. Sorry.)
What’s so interesting to me is that former engineers groove on UbD. You are the umpteenth person to say this to me or Jay. But size of class has little to do with PBL or UbD. This is a key misunderstanding. On the contrary, if the problems are mapped out and the solution paths are mapped out – as in all games – then it doesn’t matter how many people you are teaching. Look at a simpler example: Eric Mazur’s Physics class at Harvard. 200 students, countless problems of a conceptual and practical kind, class after class; use the clickers to reveal thought (and misconception); debug thinking on the fly in response to patterns of thought.
Look at any good Track practice (I was a track coach and my daughter is a senior running track); think of a great robotics course: dozens of kids doing things, with helpful coaching. The key is self-sustaining work, designed in from the start. The content march is gone; content can be learned on an as-needed basis via online lectures and demos (cf. the Gizmos for physics).
I hear you, and I do exactly as you suggest. But there are significant differences between typical HS and Eric Mazur’s students. I’m sure you can appreciate that. Same with the track students. For example, Mazur’s students elected to be in that class, have the prerequisite skills, speak and understand the language, are more socially developed, tend to have greater discipline and intellectual curiosity, and are financially invested in being there. Likewise, track students chose to join track and most likely the lesser skilled runners, or those unable to run, were cut, creating a more homogeneous group.
Do you have any thoughts about how we can evolve the process of how colleges measure incoming students? That is, how do we reduce the importance of a single high-stakes test and place more importance on real examples of what students have investigated and learned over (a relatively longer) time? (And wouldn’t this better cultivate a love of learning?)
I have been conducting interviews with outstanding coaches in a couple of different high school sports to pursue this same thread, and I would note the following: content is indeed not the core track for them, but working on basic skills over and over, in fact every day, is a key to developing a winning athlete. If they don’t have the basic skills down, the rest is never going to matter. My daughter plays volleyball for the US National team, and she still runs through the basics of how to set a ball every day!
I think this is a concept that needs to transfer to the classroom, and the question is what are those basic skills in the classroom? What we are all saying is that the list of basic skills that are required for success are not the same as they have been in the past, and classroom teachers need to adapt their programs to integrate these skills. We can learn a lot from the work that takes place in the gym, the track, and the ball field, but only when we clarify that SKILLS no longer refer to the three R’s.
Coach Wooden ignored content. His players were forbidden to know game scores. Rather, Coach expected them to perform at their personal and teamwork best, and to work at the next increment of skill development. His book should inspire of course, but often depresses, given the primacy of today’s educationists’ (Jacquez Barzun’s term) scoreboards. One shouldn’t expect the calf to prosper, if the weighing to see how it’s doing leaves little time for food and exercise.
You wrote: “Only blind habit keeps us from exploring this obvious logic.”
I think I disagree. I feel that it’s the career politicians/school board members etc. that would get voted out if they supported stuff like this, that keep us where we are…
Great challenging views. I like it! And many of the points are salient and relevant. Thanks.
Reblogged this on Renovating My Classroom and commented:
“So, suppose knowledge is not the goal of education. Rather, suppose today’s content knowledge is an offshoot of successful ongoing learning in a changing world – in which ‘learning’ means ‘learning to perform in the world.’ “
Why is this time and place so uniquely different from any other time and place? I think innovation occurs by combining current knowledge in a way that has not been done before. That requires background knowledge to accomplish. In the sports arena, basketball players can be most creative when they have a firm foundation in the basic skills. Pete Maravich is my favorite example. He was a creative player with flair and style, and that was developed though hour upon hour of practice and drill in the fundamentals.
Mr. Wiggins says
The point is to do new things with content, not simply know what others know – in any field.
But don’t you have to know what others know before you can do new things? I do think that performance is a better goal of learning than simply knowledge, however I think knowledge is both an offshoot and a building block of that learning.
Each day I struggle to identify what factors seem to be bogging down our educational system and ultimately student learning. Clearly, we need to do something different if we are to see some progress. As is most often the case (there are a few exceptions) Mr. Wiggins points resonate with me. I believe they do each some of what constructivism and experiential learning offer, but with a new focus on having classroom instruction getting students to do something as a first priority. Then their seeking knowledge becomes part of the challenge, not the end goal. How much more engaging! I particularly liked this line:
“Knowledge is an indicator of educational success, not the aim”
Our current education system stresses assessment of knowledge and clearly does not support this claim. What I hear Grant advocating for requires a paradigm shift. One that will require a shift away from our current philosophies and move us more towards a model of doing first and acquiring knowledge to support our efforts. As I mentioned when I reblogged this some weeks ago, I enjoyed working with Grant in our New Jersey consortium a few years ago. My hope is to somehow continue our good work together with this common focus.
After rereading my post,, this should be the correct line:
I believe Grant’s ideas echo some of what constructivism and experiential learning offer, but with a new focus on having classroom instruction getting students to do something as a first priority.
[…] Maybe “offshoot” is the best thing that a teacher can hope for: So, suppose knowledge is not the goal of education. Rather, suppose today’s content knowledge is an offshoot of successful ongoing learning in a changing world – in which ‘learning’ means ‘learning to perform in the world.’ […]
How can I put this in effect to Homeschool my 3rd grader?
Grant, I greatly appreciate this blog. We first met at Eaglecrest High School in the Denver suburbs circa 1994, and I was impressed (upon) as a young math teacher by your notions of assessment (performance-based, multiple, rubrics–some vague memories, I believe). Later in my career I read your Understanding By Design and thought, sigh, it seems as though our paths have diverged in terms of thinking about schooling and especially curriculum. However, what you state here brings me full circle.
I write though to ask something I have trouble reconciling–a sample of how UbD tuned me out. In the 2005 version, there is a passage “The first stage in the design process calls for clarity about priorities. We must make choices—we have more content than we can address. Stage two, determine acceptable evidence…” (p. 19).
I struggle with what seems to be a content focus in UbD, and what you say here.
Thanks for considering… -brian
What a fine and clear articulation of the issue of “content” in American education today. One of the reasons why media literacy education emphasizes critical analysis and media production is because it ties competencies to highly relevant performances in the real world, as we participate in digital media communities and consume news, advertising, information and entertainment through mass media and popular culture.
[…] Grant Wiggins suggests So, suppose knowledge is not the goal of education. Rather, suppose today’s content knowledge is an offshoot of successful ongoing learning in a changing world – in which ‘learning’ means ‘learning to perform in the world.’ […]
Grant, I’ve been working on a model for preschool – early learning – that’s all about performance of music, dance, theater and visual arts. Brain-based learning on an arts-based platform where the basics (numbers, colors, letters, literacy, etc) are learned as a by-product of the performance. I’ve pulled in the research of Dr. Maryanne Wolff (Tufts University, “Proust and the Squid”, 1 Laptop Per Child), Dr Ani Patel (Neurosciences Institute, “Music, Language and the Brain”), Dr. John Ratey (Harvard Psychiatrist, ADHD expert, “Driven to Distraction” and “Spark”), and a little Bill Glasser (The Quality). After 4 years of designing, we begin our first small 7 weeks of testing this summer in urban (Orlando), suburban (Minneapolis), and rural (Northern MN near the Nett Lake Indian Reservation) sites. I would LOVE to get your take on what we’re trying to attempt, accomplish, and learn before our second wave of testing begins in the fall. We think it’s a no-brainer because its a whole-brainer. Might I contact you offline? Rich Melheim, founder of the “Preschool Incubators Project” skunkworks.
Sure – email me. gwiggins at authentiedcuation.org
I just came across this conversation and was struck by two comments mentioning engineering. I am a STEM curriculum developer involved in projects that emphasize integrating math, science, and technology knowledge by engaging students in engineering problem-solving. What sold me on STEM (pursued as I describe) is that it lends itself to bringing together all of the best practices I’ve learned through my career.
According to many of my colleagues’ ideal vision, students acquire and apply knowledge through their efforts at solving engineering problems. Sometimes, however, we in the STEM fields find that trial and error allows students to solve the problem – without necessarily gaining insight into the connected content. The field is learning how to help students encounter content “just in time”, but that’s a bit contrived. I don’t want to force students to sit and listen (or even have interesting interactions) because *I* say they “need” the information to be successful, but I do want them to learn the content knowledge, first in the context of the problem and then in a way that transfers to new situations. I believe in the promise of the approach,but many papers presented at recent STEM conferences have stressed the importance of being explicit in the classroom about the content connections. This indicates to me that we as a field are not convinced that learning of key content will occur as a wholly natural offshoot of doing. We still have to find reasonable structures and ways of organizing student reflection to help foster the learning we value (the process and the content).
It seems to me that one of the key events in engineering is the redesign of solutions after students have made their initial (perhaps intuitive) attempts to make an idea work. That seems to be a critical time to intervene with important questions about what types of information students used in their design, and whether their ideas (knowledge) need(s) to be checked or investigated a little more.
In light of this post and Grant’s recent article on feedback in the latest issue of EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP, I see this as akin to the coach asking a player, “What do you think matters most when you kick the ball? How does that seem to be working out when you try to make a goal? What if we tried looking at other approaches to kicking, or trying some new styles out; maybe you can find a few ideas in there about how to improve our own kick.”
(Better yet, perhaps over time, with the right environment, students will begin to take on that coach voice for themselves. The Harvard University project Making Learning Visible has a publication, *Making Teaching Visible: Documenting Individual and Group Learning as Professional Development*, in which two teachers write about students’ right to revise work, an idea they committed to after a student group requested a chance to revise a skit they had developed as a part of a civil rights study; they saw a video of their performance and realized they could have done much better. How wonderful!)
Thanks for the insightful post and thoughtful responses.
“in which ‘learning’ means ‘learning to perform in the world.’” And so, shouldn’t what happens in school be a time for kids to practice “performing in the world”? Maybe it is because I teach science, primarily biology, that I believe there is nothing wrong that trying to cover certain topics. However, HOW they are covered is a critical question. The beauty of science is that we do NOT know it all: the more we learn, the more we know we do not know. Still, I will admit that perhaps my best teaching occurred last year when I did not have a text book: everything we did was based on dissecting members of the animal kingdom, and then talking about what we saw, what the structures might do, how it survived, and we compared/contrasted everything. We had no set curriculum, and it was really fun. BUT the kids still had to study, show what they had mastered in content, and show they could think about what we discovered. I wish my IB bio course this year had that flexibility, but hopefully it has some aspects of discovery and wonder.
Thank you for so eloquently stating something I too have felt for years. While for most of my colleagues the highest accolade they give themselves is “life long learner” I personally aspire to be a life long achiever. Otherwise as far as I can tell all you will ever be any good at is pub quizzes (or perhaps teaching, thank you Mr Wilde)
Staring with a specific action and problem gives learning purpose and focus and at the end provides us with that wonderful feeling, knowing we have actually achieved something. From this truth has all human development stemmed.
In the front of our Grade5 wing used to hand some banner about being a lifelong learner-I replaced the banner on the way in to read “What will you achieve today?” And on the way out the last thing the students see is one that says “What did you achieve today?”
Bravo to you good Sir! Bravo!
What fascinates me is that many teachers do not even get the distinction. I have often had to explain it carefully in workshops. I think it also links to issues of feedback (see my blog entry http://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2012/11/04/on-feedback-13-practical-examples-per-your-requests/) and people’s clear or fuzzy conception of stating goals, developing plans to achieve them, and using feedback to adjust en route. In a typical ‘coverage’ curriculum there is little or not chance to do so.
The concept of building capacity to be applied to real-life situations has been my montage while I am in my first year as a literacy coach at a new school. In thinking about this, I have been trying to not only think about capacity in students but also in adults so that professional development,. team meetings, planning time, observations, and other practices extend beyond that moment in time. This is a harder and slower process. I am interested in your thoughts on planning backwards from performance rather than end goal content knowledge. I am particularly interested in planning the implementation of writing instruction through coaching adults with this theory in mind.
This is more than theory. It’s a fact of daily life. Curriculum is not about contents, but performance. Someone said that ‘content’ is what you decide to do with your time.
Thanks for this strong support to learning!
[…] Here is something for those parents who really enjoy having an educational debate and especially about the curriculum. This will certainly give you something to discuss around the Christmas table or after dinner with traditional brandy or sherry. http://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/everything-you-know-about-curriculum-may-be-wrong-reall… […]
[…] Wiggens expounds on this idea in much more detail in his set of posts on curriculum. He points out that, as Dewey wrote in Democracy and Education, learners must first […]
[…] a post from last March, Grant Wiggins published a blog post titled “Everything you know about curriculum may be wrong. Really.” It seems here is another connection to our philosophy of Thinking Classrooms. We’ve […]
Reblogged this on timetostopandthink and commented:
As I was following the Twitter feed of the ASCD13 Conference attendees today I got a link to this post. It was so closely tied to my thoughts last week when I started writing here I had to reblog it.
I have an ongoing argument (mostly in my head for what I assume are obvious reasons) with test creators and the people they send into schools to push data collection and data use. I find the fact that someone has sold us something and is then hovering around to be sure we use it ‘right’ so our scores on their tests go up, disturbing on many levels. It has always bothered me but this year it has begun to make me question why my beliefs about education seem to be so far afield from those I see unfolding around me.
I realized I was having a pedagogical crisis of sorts one night when I was watching TV in the dark in the middle of the night. Normally I wouldn’t have been watching a rerun of a show called NUMB3RS, which I had never seen before, but I was tired and it had been a long week and I was thinking more than watching so it didn’t matter what was on in the background. However, it turned out that I tuned in for the exact moment when one of the characters said, “statistical probability is a wonderful tool, but when applied to human performance it is only an extrapolation of the past”. That was the moment when my wish to reach out and find other people who wanted to stop and think about what was going on was born.
This blog post put me in the same frame of mind so I had to share it.
Good blog post, but contains a serious, albeit common, mis-representation of Copernicus!
“The Copernican hypothesis eventually made sense because it did two things: made better sense of the data, and dealt with increasingly embarrassing anomalies in the Ptolemaic view”
In fact, the Copernican system was *more* convoluted in that it required more epicycles and more contortions to account for the planetary motion. In some cases, it was even *less* accurate.
Copernicus made a fundamental error– he argued that the planets moved with uniform circular motion–which is wrong on both counts, neither uniform nor circular.
The reality is that it took empirical observations (by Galileo of Venus and Jupiter’s moons) and a new theory of planetary orbits (Kepler’s recognition that they moved in ellipses) to lead to acceptance of Copernicus’s model (so much for Thomas Kuhn’s shift of paradigms notion).
Galileo seeing the phases of Venus was the killer observation (could not happen under the Ptolemaic system); seeing the moons going around Jupiter suggested other centers of motion); while Kepler’s brilliant insight that the planets move in ellipses around the Sun was the needed perspective, his laws were the first that truly accounted for the planets’ motions.
[…] Grant Wiggins asks us to question what we know about curriculum in this piece…what would happen if we made a significan shift in how we look at curriculum?"What if the earth moves and the sun is at rest? What if gravity is just a special case of space-time? Following both counter-intuitive premises revolutionized science and ushered in the modern world. Could a similar counter-intuitive thought experiment advance education from where I believe we are currently stuck? I believe so." […]
[…] still for morning practices, nullifying the effect of the “late” start. I take to heart what Grant Wiggins has written about performance as the real outcome of curriculum, but there is essential content that must be learned, somehow. I see the work that organizations […]
I mostly remember things that had affective influence on me… Movies that made me need to manage my emotions in front of my peers… Projects that had me working with others I wanted to build relationships with… Projects that included speaking in front of a group of my peers – snapshots of times that stuck out to be as being very uncomfortable or very pleasurable. Not the only way to retain or learn, but that’s what sticks with me. Great article!
[…] just finished reading the blog post “Everything you know about curriculum might be wrong. Really.” by Grant Wiggins. It was really fascinating. In his post, Wiggins explains why we need to […]
[…] / Resources 01. Rigour: What it Is, and What it Isn’t 02. 7 things every kid should master 03. Everything you know about curriculum may be wrong. Really. 04. how the decision was made. 05. Learning Walks (but of a different sort) 06. ‘Grit’ […]
[…] https://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/everything-you-know-about-curriculum-may-be-wrong-real… […]
[…] You can find Grant Wiggins’ blog and post on Everything you know about curriculum may be wrong.. http://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/everything-you-know-about-curriculum-may-be-wrong-reall… […]
[…] Sri K Pattabhi Jois, the codifier of the Ashtanga system is often quoted as saying, “Yoga is 99% practice and 1% theory”. Now, most likely he was not just referring to 99% being the physical practice, but rather, the greater practice of daily yoga. However, without getting too far into what is a popular Ashtanga debate, the main point on any level is that “productive” learning is ultimately achieved through doing, through experiencing, not through purely thinking and memorizing. I was reminded of this while reading Everything you know about curriculum may be wrong. Really. […]
[…] Sri K Pattabhi Jois, the codifier of the Ashtanga system is often quoted as saying, “Yoga is 99% practice and 1% theory”. Now, most likely he was not just referring to 99% being the physical practice, but rather, the greater practice of daily yoga. However, without getting too far into what is a popular Ashtanga debate, the main point on any level is that “productive” learning is ultimately achieved through doing, through experiencing, not through purely thinking and memorizing. I was reminded of this while reading Everything you know about curriculum may be wrong. Really. […]
[…] by scientists and behaviors and abilities that build life-long learning (quite reflective of this post). Finally, all of our bioinformatics courses require students to take an active approach to their […]
[…] article Everything You Know About Curriculum Might be Wrong. Really. really resonated with me from a curriculum development standpoint. The author made the point that […]
[…] best known as co-author of the book Understanding by Design, wrote an blog post entitled: “Everything you know about curriculum may be wrong. Really.” Wiggins asks the question: “… what results if we think of action, not […]
[…] https://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/everything-you-know-about-curriculum-may-be-wrong-real… […]
[…] Wiggins, G. (2012, March 12). Everything you know about curriculum may be wrong. Really. Retrieved from https://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/everything-you-know-about-curriculum-may-be-wrong-real… […]
[…] article originally appeared on Grant’s personal blog; Image attribution flickr users tulanepublicrelations and […]
[…] I wish to claim that defining a course as a tour through the textbook, page by page, is simply not a course by any valid set of criteria. A textbook is merely a collection of topics, with exercises and text […]
[…] Grant Wiggins suggests […]