We mentioned in the Jan. 14 webinar that there would be a reading assignment prior to that, and here it is. Please read "The Intellectual and Policy Foundations of the 21st Century Skills Framework." We'll discuss the article at the Feb. 18 meeting, so come with your questions and comments. Also, feel free to use your 21st Century skills to engage in a discussion of the article in the comments here.
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In reading the assigned article I was struck by the discussion of "depth over breadth of coverage" and the statement that "trying to cover too many topics may actually prevent sustained engagement with a discipline's core ideas."
ReplyDeleteI think this statement is true not only of K-12 education in general but also of higher education.
When I taught an Intro to American Government class at OTC I was generally given a 400 or 500 page textbook with 15 or so chapters to be taught during the course of the semester. All the chapters were important but there was no way to teach the entire book and if you tried it would have resulted in your students having only a glancing familiarity with the concepts. My response was generally just to pick out what I thought was most important and ignore the rest. I have often thought, and still think, that the class could have been better taught with no textbook but by having the students read "Team of Rivals," the Doris Kearns Goodwin biography of Lincoln. All the themes and issues they needed to know and that are still relevant to this day (federalism, state's rights, the Constitution, Supreme Court, propaganda, special interests, war, civil rights) are in that book - but they are presented in a narrative form and interwoven and placed in context and describe real events. Teaching the class from just this one book, I am convinced, would have led to a deeper engagement with the core ideas my students needed to understand. But if you would have tested those same students on their "breadth" of knowledge they probably would have suffered.
If, as the article suggests, MAP and the other assessment tools, are geared to the "breadth" of coverage, we seem to have a real dilemma because of our responsibilities in reporting out acheivement.
So how do we manage to teach "depth" (and test "depth") but still test "breadth"?
And how do we deal with lowered "breadth" results?
Just a few thoughts.