New Curricula for a

CHAPTER 8 MZ aS PE G@: New Curricula for a New Way of Teaching A smart man makes a mistake, learns from it, and never makes that mistake again. But a wise man finds a smart man and learns from him how to avoid the mistake altogether. —Roy H. Williams How do we put all this into practice? First, let’s make sure we avoid creating departments around each of the 12 cognitive processes. The organization around subjects, which is the basis of how our schools are organized, is the source of the problem in both universities and high schools. Subjects create departments. Departments in universities are a se- rious problem for students and administrators. They represent silos where decisions are made that will help the department prosper. De- partments lobby for their courses to be required so they can hire more faculty. They make sure majors in their departments follow certain rules for graduation that are intended to make students scholars in their field rather than practitioners. Departments are the reason stu- dents graduate without job skills. Faculty are almost always against practical training. English departments have to be forced to teach stu- dents to write. Computer science departments have to be forced to teach students to program in a way that would make them hirable by industry. Psychology departments avoid teaching clinical psychology, which is really what students what to learn more about. For about 10 years I have been building new online story-centered curricula. The idea behind a story-centered curriculum (SCC) is that a good curriculum should tell a story. That story should be one in which the student plays one or more roles. Those roles should be those that normally come up in such a story. These curricula are intended to teach students how to actually do something. The roles students play &g HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023835