The Living Curriculum: A Conversation about Learner Agency and Dynamic,

Negotiated Curriculum

Tina Grotzer and Bill Wilmot on behalf of our colleagues at Tremont School and the Collaborative Learning Project

Project Zero Classroom July 2016

“What is your image of the child?” -Reggio

The Hole in the Wall Experiments

by Sugata Mitra

“Did you see lots of things at the museum?” “No, I just saw two.” “You went on a field trip

for hours to the air and space museum and just saw two things?” “Well, Theo and I were trying to figure out how to overcome gravity in Kerbal Space Program. So we studied the design of a successful rocket and drew it in our journals. Then we found another one that was really

different, so we drew that one. Then we compared them and how their features worked.

When we tried it out, we landed on the moon and went up ten levels!” – 13-year-old boy and his mother

competent planful

agentive collaborative

able to develop expertise draws upon evidence

motivated to figure things out

The Power of Agency

Learning from and through agency is part of our core human cognition.

-Susan Carey, 2011

Pedagogical Models that Afford Learner Agency

• Constructivism

• The Organic School Movement

• Reggio Emilia • Expeditionary Learning

• The Living Curriculum

Teaching for Understanding

• Generative Topics

• Understanding Goals

• Performances of Understanding (that both build and reveal understanding)

• On-Going Assessment

• (Throughlines)

• (Essential Questions)

Classical expertise means knowing a subject and domain very deeply.

Backward Design • Works from Understanding Goals and develops

instruction aimed specifically at those goals. • The designer develops very explicit statements of

what the learner is expected to come to understand. For instance: “Students will understand that mass divided by volume equals density.”

• UGs are different from objectives: “Students will understand density.” There are many different ways to understand density (a “dots per box model” that shows how much matter is distributed across how much space or they might understand it as a formula “M/V= D”)

Developing expertise requires being able to set learning goals at the edge of one’s

competence; this is an important type of learning how to learn.

“Backward Design,” considered the gold

standard in curriculum development processes, require setting understanding goals for learners well in advance of their

interaction with the curriculum.

Some Tensions in Backward Design • Preordained: Avoiding aimless learning can

stifle the unfolding process of learning and can disenfranchise the learner from their own investment in the learning…

• Valuing what is easily specifiable in advance: What about intangibles and individualized learning outcomes?

• Who decides?: The focus on outcomes can pre-empt important learning about setting a path.

Some UGs are highly specified:

• Objects that are made of different materials can have the same mass and different volumes, or the same volumes but different mass. This is because of a property called "density."

• All matter has density.

• One way to think about density is to think about how crowded or packed a material is.

• The denser a material is, the more crowded or more tightly packed the “particles” are.

Some UGs allow for intangibles and idiosyncratic outcomes…

1) Students will understand the difference between the individual good and the common good. → Students will identify misalignments between individual and common good in puzzle. → Students will collaboratively develop class norms. 2) Students will better understand the roles that they themselves tend to play in groups. → Students will write reflections on their roles in the class exercise. 3) Student will better understand the perspectives of others. → Students will describe the perspectives of others in a writing reflection. Unit on “The Common Good” by Shawn Lavoie

“Sometimes you can’t see your learning path till you look back. I had

a goal but it got better along the way.” -Eighth grader

Adaptive experts know how to gain deep understanding of a domain.

Learning how to be a skilled and adaptive learner is one of

the most important things that we can help students to learn. There are so many sources of information and ways to gain

knowledge. Helping them understand how to chart journeys towards understanding, to assess what they do and do not

yet know, where there may be stumbling blocks, and how to pursue learning goals in the face of difficulty and frustration

are all essential parts of developing adaptive expertise.

Adaptive Experts

• Work at the edge of their competence.

• Engage in progressive problem-solving.

• View failure or errors as steps in a process towards success.

• Focus on techniques for upping their game/ process.

• Set evolving and revisable paths towards learning.

Big Questions

• How might we balance the value of backward design with the importance of enabling learners to set their learning agendas and paths?

• How do we help learners gain societally important understandings while helping them learn how to learn in the executive, self-authoring sense?

Living Curriculum

“A living curriculum is one that is dynamic and changeable; It responds to what is relevant at that time.”

“A living curriculum is about real world, authentic learning;

It is about what one needs to know to live well in the world.”

“A living curriculum invites learner agency;

It is developed by the one living it and is what life-long learners do.”

Living Curriculum at Tremont School A Work in Progress…

• Learners set learning paths

• The curriculum is negotiated.

• Expertise is distributed across students and others in the school community.

• Educators take the role of interested and interesting adults who help learners figure out how to find resources and locate expertise.

• Students are given the opportunity to self-regulate.

Self-regulated learners…

• …do things to structure their environment to benefit their learning.

• …are more proactive in adjusting environmental stimuli and asking questions.

• …notice their attentional capacities and learn to adjust and accommodate their patterns.

Increasing self-regulation is part of human development. Schools can discourage or encourage its growth.

Learning Spaces

• Movements in the visual field “grab” human attention. This results in the loss of the information in short-term memory.

• Students need to be able to seek out different

kinds of spaces (ones that support working alone, in pairs, small and large groups).

• Making spaces where learners can enter a “flow

state” without being distracted is essential to learning.

Expertise is distributed.

Students respect each other and feel confident based upon their special

forms of expertise.

What can be learned from the gaming community?

The power of…

• affinity groups

• inherent feedback and leveling

• self-assessment

• distributed expertise.

Pictures of Practice: What will I see in the classroom that reflects the “Living Curriculum”?

Learners negotiate their path through the curriculum with guidance for their teacher. • Learners conference with their teacher to discuss their learning interests and goals and

this results in a plan for that individual student. • Learners are encouraged to work with their teacher to seek the appropriate level of

challenge in their work. It should be challenging and failure viewed as steps along the path towards mastery. You will see learners asking for harder concepts in math or to rework a paper or for support learning a literature concept.

Learners are encouraged to self-regulate and to manage their cognitive and emotional resources. • Students take breaks as they need them. • Students set up spaces to work in and receive support in managing who is sitting near

them. • Students have flexibility in when they work on particular tasks The focus is on connecting the curriculum to the real world and to life-long learning. • Students are asked to make connections to real-world content. • As students move into the upper grades, increasingly their learning takes place away

from campus and out in the world.

“I don’t know why that kid would want to

come here. They aren’t interested in anything.”

“I kept asking him what he wanted to learn

and he didn’t have ANY ideas.”

What excites you about the idea of “Living Curriculum”?

What puzzles do you see?

Graduation Requirements

Project Zero Papers: Grotzer, T.A. & Solis, S.L. (2016). Curating experience: The role of learner agency in museums and schools and the development of adaptive expertise. In D. Sobel & J. Jipson (Eds.) Relating research and practice: Cognitive development in museum settings. New York: Psychology Press. Look for a book on the Living Curriculum soon!