Professional Learning for Busy Educators

Learn more about a Social-Emotional Learning curriculum you can use in your school this year. It includes lesson plans and SEL lesson ideas.

Via NextLearning

A key person in the Progressive era was Ralph Tyler, the Director of Research for what came to be called the 8-Year Study – a major investigation, funded by the Carnegie Foundation, into the effects of progressive education. Tyler went on a few years later to write the modern classic text on curriculum-framing (based on his work as Director of Evaluation for the 8-Year Study) entitled The Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction. Yet, in spite of the book’s success – it is still widely read in graduate courses – Tyler’s rejection of the standard view of curriculum continues to be ignored.

He was quite blunt about the error of conventional curriculum: “it is clear that a statement of objectives in terms of content headings…is not a satisfactory basis for guiding the further development of the curriculum.” The critique resulted from a premise about the aim of education (since curriculum is the formal path by which we achieve our educational aims). What is the aim of any curriculum? According to Tyler, the general aim is “to bring about significant changes in students’ patterns of behavior.” In other words, though we often lose sight of this basic fact, the point of learning is not just to know things but to be a different person – more mature, more wise, more self-disciplined, more effective, and more productive in the broadest sense. Knowledge is an indicator of educational success, not the aim. Thus, the conventional view of curriculum and the process of conventional curriculum writing must be wrong:

Via Jim Lerman