Let’s Take It From the Top!

If I were to start a school, it would take the basic essentials from the school environment that I currently teach at and switch up a few things. I do not think I need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to designing a new school environment. I think the modern environment has taken positive steps since I was a student myself in elementary school. For example, I really like the addition of restorative practices which were not an official thing when I was young. having teachers waiting by doors to greet the students and putting an emphasis on building a connection with students is a great initiative I have seen the teaching world make in the last 15 years.

When it comes to my changes, I believe I would change the way we teach the curriculum. According to our readings, young students "do not deposit the knowledge that adults try to feed them in their memory banks in the same way they do learn to do later on" (Papert, 1993). He also brings up that we are defining literacy as being able to read and write, but in reality we should be looking at it as a form of "reading the world" and a moment when we as learners changing our way of how we think about the world around us. Therefore, I would take this mindset which I agree with and use it to shape the way curriculum is taught.

So many assignments that we deliver to the students are set in stone. The county tells us that we have standards, however we can deliver the curriculum any way we see fit. The issue is that we are only given 1 text to read. This narrows our readily available options for differentiation and leads to cookie cutter lessons. In my school, I would put a larger emphasis on having students explore the topics that they are curious about while still following the standards. I believe there is a fine line to follow between letting kids explore the world and exposing them to new information that they might not be curious about simply because they have never encountered it.

As for an example, when I taught third grade our curriculum wanted us to teach students how to write about an event in a sequential order. They gave us a rather dull text about Whooping Crane birds and this lead to students being uninterested and feeling like we are forcing this information on them. My school's curriculum would center around letting students choose any event in history that peaked their interest and then teachers can focus on sticking to the standards of having them write about the event in sequential order. We follow the standards, but we give students the ability to choose their topic.

                                                                                                 *References*

Papert, S. A. (1993). *The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School In The Age Of The Computer (*Revised ed.). Basic Books.