Giving Compass' Take:

· Jason McKenna discusses his personal challenges dealing with education reform and suggests that a focus on curriculum and meaningful interactions between students and teachers will lead to change. 

· What approach can schools take to build better student-teacher relationships? What are the biggest obstacles when leading changes in education?

· Learn how curriculum can impact education reform.

Much like the world of education need not another reform that just adds more hassle and headaches for teachers, school and government leaders need to make very clear that what their students need is not blanket solutions or an onslaught of modern content, but instead curriculum. What, if not curriculum, brings together this new frontier of STEM content, the unique, engaging and unfamiliar?

Let’s imagine this STEM content in a different way. If we imagine the chunks of content promising to deliver 21st-century skills as individual people, all with unique strengths, personalities and challenges, we can then try to visualize why combining them into a functioning unit is not so simple – throwing them all into a room doesn’t make them a family. In this same way, no matter how unique, interesting and inspiring the individual lessons and activities designed to solve for STEM success are, a haphazard collection of lessons and activities does not immediately translate to meaningful curriculum.

To carry this analogy further; among many other things, a family provides structure, support, guidance, feedback and opportunities for growth. A curriculum does the same. This point must be emphasized because of the result that Brazil is looking for from their students is for them to become the creators, innovators and problem-solvers of tomorrow, then that is going to require them to gain and access deep reservoirs of knowledge in different domains, understand how ideas within those domains are related, and then be able to organize that information across those domains. The kind of structure, guidance and feedback needed to accomplish these worthy and ambitious goals is not possible without great curriculum.

This may make curriculum sound like our closest bet to a panacea, but a dose of realism reminds us that even developing grounded, “big idea” curriculum for the future is fraught with difficulties. After all, predicting the future is hard; and it seems to be only getting harder.

Read the full article about change in education by Jason McKenna at Getting Smart.