If there was one theme I kept encountering over and over at the ASCD Summer Conference in Boston was that good education is hard work and you can’t just port over a program, make a few tweaks and WIN. A component of this theme is that educators really need to understand the philosophy and pedagogy behind great ideas like Understanding by Design or even the Common Core Standards before really working with them. It seemed like in every session I went to it was a good hour to two hours of background and scaffolding the instruction before the speakers touched upon the meat of what they were there to discuss.
As mentioned, Common Core came up a lot and just as often were words reminding you to really read through the standards, give your staff time to really get to know them, and yet they are still just something to do along the way to real learning, they aren’t the goal. They inform the goal, but don’t dictate it.
You still need a goal, what do you want students to know or do? When you are building a house you don’t make the blueprint along the way. Similarly, when you are building a house you don’t say, “I’m going to build it to code!” and leave it at that.
I also enjoyed how everything at the conference (well, at least the sessions I went to) were woven together and they all built on each other: Use Understanding by Design to set some meaningful goals, create useful and credible assessments (GRASPS), meet the Common Core Standards along the way and put it all together with Curriculum Mapping.
I will go into these later and in more detail but I am excited about all the great ideas I took away from the East Coast. Part of me wishes I had a district/school/class of my own so I could frame my thinking around them but I have always enjoyed thinking about ideas in their pure form, without being tied to a specific situation, or trying to fit them into a set structure; like trying to figure out how this new-fangled square peg will fit into the round hole we already have and works well for us, thank you very much.