They must be learn-by-doing curricula consisting of series of

270 Teaching Minds They must be learn-by-doing curricula consisting of series of projects inside coherent stories about life in some aspect of the real world. They must be delivered on the web. Students should work on projects where the background and help are web delivered. They would submit their work to mentors and receive feedback online. Mentors in the curricula would include parents, online subject matter experts worldwide, local experts, and teachers trained to be mentors. Mentoring, unlike teaching, is not about providing information that can be found easily in books but about helping students through a problem without giving them the answer. Mentors point students in the right direction and react to their work as it progresses. Students should, on a regular basis (sometimes weekly, sometimes more often), submit work products related to each project for evaluation and feedback. Students would submit their work many times to achieve increasing mastery and get continuing feedback. There should be no competency tests, only the continual monitoring of performance. Each curriculum should be designed by a panel of experts in a given field. The curriculum should provide a simulation of what life might be like in that field. For example, students might spend the year working legal cases, or starting a business, or designing roads and bridges. Students should be encouraged to work in virtual teams, learning to deal with others to produce results. Choice must be a staple of the curricula. There can be no single set of standard requirements. Instead, students should be able to select the curricula they wish to participate in. Their records would list what deliverables they have created in their chosen curricula. Curricula must be designed around projects with clear, meaningful, achievable goals. They must be designed carefully so to incorporate all the key basic skills like reading, writing, reasoning, researching, calculating, computing, and so on, in a systematic and natural way. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023956