Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World

Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World

By Heidi Hayes Jacobs Alternative Book Review: Shabbos HaGadol Drasha 5772 Presented at Congregation Beth El Saturday, March 31, 2012

Nosson Schuman

Curriculum and Assessment Dr. Jeffery Glanz April 10, 2012

Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World

Summary
We live in an amazing time. At the touch of our fingertips, we can be connected to friends, informed of global events, access almost infinite amounts of knowledge, and be ingeniously entertained. For our youth, the opportunities for learning, personal expression and making a worldwide impact are unprecedented. The average American school system though is based upon the priorities and goals of society at the end of the 19th century. Can this system serve todays youth properly? What elements should we retain and what do need to change? How do we implement these changes? Heidi Hayes Jacobs in her new book, Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World, addresses these questions. In the first four chapters of this book, Jacobs proves to us the need for change, and instructs us with mechanisms to make it take place. In the last nine chapters, Jacobs calls on the experience and vision of other great pedagogues to write individual essays about where they see education heading, and what they have implemented or what they recommend to implement. Although the Jewish educator will have to extrapolate to apply this metamorphose to traditional Judaic subjects, nonetheless, its imperative upon every educator to read this book and understand the challenge and opportunity of these times.

Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World

Shabbos HaGadol 5772 Shabbos HaGadol, the Great Shabbos that precedes Pesach, has its outstanding name for many reasons. One reason is a traditional belief that the potentials of the upcoming week are stored within the spiritual banks of the Shabbos; the bounties of the week to come flow from the Shabbos. Therefore, the Shabbos before Passover has the qualities of Passover itself. Since Passover is the time of our freedom, of our past and future redemption, this gift is intertwined with the Holiness of the Shabbos making it more exalted than normal, hence the name Shabbos HaGadol, the Great Shabbos. Regarding the future redemption, the Pasuk in Michah says, () Like in the days when you left the land of Egypt, so shall I show you wonders. The Prophet is telling us that the future Messianic redemption will be comparable the past one. The miracles and spiritual blessings that were present in Moshes times will reappear for us as well. Hows it going to transpire? Furthermore, are we perhaps seeing it take place now? Theres an infamous quote attributed to Charles H. Duell, commissioner of US patent office in 1899. Supposedly he said, "Everything that can be invented has been invented." Theres been much research into this statement. It seems he was not the true originator of this statement. However, the quote was found in an1899 edition of Punch Magazine. In that edition, the comedy magazine offered a look at the "coming century." In colloquy, a genius asked "isn't there a clerk who can examine patents?" A boy replied "Quite unnecessary, Sir. Everything that can be invented has been invented. There have been other such statements placing limits on the range of human discovery and technology. Julius Sextus Frontinus, a prominent Roman engineer (c. 40-103 AD) is quoted to have said, Inventions reached their limit long ago and I see no hope for further development.

Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World

In a book on U.S. Patent and Trade office history entitled "Patent Office Pony" it was similarly stated, "The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity, and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end." (Patentlyo.com, 2011) Yet, we live in a time when it seems that technological advancement is endless and is progressing before our very eyes. Last year I upgraded my phone from a model that I had bought in 2008. It was the top of the line model back then, but my new android phone has made my old one seem like a relic from out of the seventies. I recently bought a storage card for the phone; its 32 gigabytes large. The amazing thing is, that is that is not even a mini SD card, its a micro SD card, smaller than my fingernail. For those of you that remember floppy disks, its the equivalent of 30, 000 of them, all in the size of my finger nail.
In fact, the hard drive producers are profiting greatly from this current administration, they call it the federal deficit hard drive. As large as the deficit is in dollars, theyll sell you a hard drive that can store that much in bytes; 11 terabytes and counting!

The effects of the rapid advancement of technology are most noticed upon our children. They are truly living in a different world than the one we grew up in. The changes are not only affecting their play and social behavior, its modifying how they learn. I recently wrote a Philosophy of Education Statement for my masters program at Azrieli. I opened it with the following words: We live in a media dominated, open-information society that is constantly evolving. Our children are exposed to captivating entertainment, cutting edge technology and global events at touch of their fingertips. Their world is one of excitement, choice and opportunity. Its the challenge of the 21 st century teacher to show that the eternal Torah speaks to the children of this day and age; that its pertinent to their lives, its stimulating and relevant. Although I personally see the impact of iPods, instant messaging and texting on my own children, I was made aware to the great bearing its having on our children

Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World

educationally from reading a book for my Curriculum and Assessment class, Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World by Heidi Hayes Jacobs (2010 Kindle edition). Jacobs decries the fact that our current bricks and mortar educational system is built upon a model designed in the late 19 th century. She makes that claim that many of our practices, the curricula and assessments have to be updated or even better, discarded and replaced. In making her case, she rallies the most avant-garde educators to present their philosophies and implementations as well. In order to understand our children better, we should take heed to the words of educator Marc Prensky, he says, I've coined the term digital native to refer to today's students. They are native speakers of technology, fluent in the digital language of computers, video games, and the Internet. I refer to those of us who were not born into the digital world as digital immigrants. We have adopted many aspects of the technology, but just like those who learn another language later in life, we retain an "accent" because we still have one foot in the past. (2010, Kindle
Locations 3001-3006)

Similarly, Stephen Wilmarth writes, In July 2008, Google engineers announced that they believed there were 1 trillion unique URLsthe unique address of a Web page. In the same announcement, Google engineers estimated that the Web is growing by several billion individual Web pages per day. There is only one explanation for the incredible rate of creating, copying, mixing, and remixing of information available to anyone with an Internet connection, and that is the raw power of social production to create information and knowledge artifacts. (2010, Kindle Locations 1272-1274) Whos making these billions of daily webpages? Its our youth. Wilmarth continues, Within an incredibly short timeless than five yearsthe real cost of publishing and reaching a mass audience has dropped to nearly zero. (2010, Kindle locations 1276)This ability is unlike anything before. In the past, if one wanted to publish a book, it cost large sums of money. If one wanted to air a documentary, it

Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World

took great resources. Now, anyone with a computer can write a blog or post a video that can be read and seen by millions. But this is only half of the story. Listen to this quote from Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, Search is so highly personal that searching is empowering for humans like nothing else; it is about self-empowerment; it is antithesis of being told or taught. It is empowering individuals to do what they think best with the information they want. It is very different from anything else that preceded it. Radio was one-to-many. TV was one-to-many. The telephone was one-toone. Search is the ultimate expression of the power of the individual; using a computer, looking at the world, and finding exactly what they want, everyone is different when it comes to that. (2010, Kindle Locations 3125-3130) Todays technology is empowerment. Its enabling the average digital native to connect with the whole world, and become self-informed. Educator Bill Sheskey says, Before the Internet and mass media, people who earned advanced degrees in the traditional education system were considered scholars. One could become highly knowledgeable in a particular field through years of study from books, lectures, and experimentation. Today, instant access to just about any fact, knowledge base, or piece of information created by any scholar can be accessed with one click of the mouse. Problem-solving methods are changing because we have instant access to information and an unprecedented ability to collaborate to solve problems. (2010,Kindle Locations
3130-3134)

We live in self-empowering times. Never has the individual had access to so much information and potential global impact. In fact this empowerment is changing education as a whole. When we grew up, we sat attentively in the class and listened to the teacher. Jacobs says the whole future

Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World

of education is changing to project based learning. Theyre expected to produce experiments, research and projects and subsequently present them online or in school fairs. In Rhode Island, one has to assemble an online portfolio of his accomplishments, culled from throughout high school career to be judged by a board panel before he can graduate. Can one imagine what incentive this gives one to be industrious? Now this is fascinating, because on the original Shabbos HaGadol, the Shabbos before the Exodus, we also became self-empowered. We circumcised ourselves, and we grabbed an Egyptian holy animal to offer as a sacrifice to our G-d. As the Hagaddah says, , , through your blood you shall live! we took control of our own destiny by performing these two acts. Fifty days later we became commanded in all the mitzvot, becoming empowered as partners with G-d in the perfection of this world. In the year 2448, we became empowered, and three millennia later with internet 2.0, we are becoming empowered again. This empowerment is actually helping the state of Israel. A good friend of mine, Evan Goldstein, visited Israel recently and wrote a blog about the state of events there. Its fascinating, a blog is another form of internet empowerment, one person without a printing press and publisher can write something read by thousands and perhaps millions of people. He writes, The real story, though, is that the economic crisis that has crippled the other developed economies of the world seems to have simply passed Israel by. Unemployment is down to a historic record low of 5%, and one of my cousins put it, Those 5% wouldnt take a job if you made them. Meanwhile, while credit markets collapsed and GDP growth rates went negative the world over, Israel never experienced a recession, and annual GDP growth is now chugging away at 4%. It has left everyone scratching their heads at this enormous stroke of good fortune. I believe that the second reason for Israels recent success is the, Inverted Pyramid. The early Zionist visionaries noticed that, while most societies

Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World

are constituted of a large pool of unskilled laborers at the bottom of the pyramid, and above them a smaller group of skilled laborers, above them a smaller still group of better educated, and on top a tiny group of elites, the demographics of the Jews in exile were the opposite. One quarter of the Nobel prizes have gone to a population that constitutes one quarter of one percent of the worlds population. Even amongst the heavily assimilated population in America 59% Jews have college educations, while only 27% of the general population does. There was grave concern that forming a state from such an over-educated population would be impossible, with too many scientists and philosophers but nobody to hew the wood and haul the water. Israel has always suffered from a brain drain as the economy could never fulfill the ambitions of its educated class. Today, the game is changing. The great systemic problem the other developed countries face today, beyond their insolvent social programs, is what to do with all of the unskilled or uneducated laborers who cant compete with their low-wage counterparts abroad. In Israel today, if you want to manufacture a high-tech product, you have a team of trained engineers design the part in Haifa, then send the plans to China to have it manufactured for sale in the West. If you have an idea for a new software program, you start a company and flesh out the concept in Tel Aviv, then hire a team of software engineers in Bombay turn it into a completed product. The curse of the, Inverted Pyramid, may gradually become a blessing. The way you left the land of Egypt, so shall I show you wonders. When we left Egypt, there was rapid change: we witnessed Ten Plagues, the Splitting of the Red Sea and the Revelation on Mt. Sinai, and we obtained physical and emotional freedom, all within a years time. We gained empowerment as well, as we empowered ourselves through Bris Milah and the Karban Pesach and the acceptance of all the mitzvot.

Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World

Perhaps the swift developments that we are witnessing in our times are signs that were on the cusp of the future redemption. The Prophet Isaiah says, (1) :() () , In its time, I will speed it up. When the redemption comes, things will move quickly. Technology is evolving, transforming how we live and learn, and empowerment is the new by-word of our time. This technological boom is even positively affecting the economy of Israel, bringing it to new levels of prosperity. People are making Aliyah because of financial benefit, something unheard of in the past. We originally asked, If the future redemption will be in the same manner of the Exodus, then how are these changes going to occur? Perhaps we are seeing the beginning stages now. Rapid technological change, new ways of learning, empowerment of the masses, and even prosperity in Israel is occurring before our very eyes. Maybe these transformations will develop full-speed into the ultimate redemption. Maybe they are a portent to better and grander days ahead. Until then though, its upon us to seize the bounty of times. To utilize the technology, understand and teach our children better, run with this empowerment and make the world a better place. Good Shabbos and Chag Sameach.

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References

Jacobs, H. H. (2010) Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World, Alexandria, VA, Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Kindle Edition

Goldstein, E. (2012, March 26) Matzav Update: Boom times, Retrieved from: http://planetisrael.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2012-01-1

Patentlyo: The nations leading patent law blog (2011, January 6) Tracing the Quote: Everything that can be Invented has been Invented, Retrieved March 30, 2012, from http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2011/01/tracing-the-quote-

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Postscript I realize that this is not a real book review. I enjoyed the novelty of a different type of project, a form of differentiated instruction, but I realize that I did not cover as many points as I would have in a true review. In a the actual review I would have quoted how the new technology is allowing the students to learn at home and subsequently work one on one with the teacher,
In other words, you can broadcast and record the audio and video of your teaching of a math lesson on the distributive property, including everything you write on your interactive whiteboard, in class this year, so next year's students can watch that lesson on their home computers for homework, thus allowing you to use class time in new ways that enhance learning. Students who are absent can watch the class in real time. Students who did not completely understand the content can review it at home that night. Parents can better assist their struggling student. Students can now have shared learning experiences around this content delivered to their computers in their homes, even on their iPods. Indeed, class time can now be a richer personal encounter between the student and the teacher because of technological affordances. (Kindle Locations 2021-2028) Additionally, I would have mentioned how this project based learning truly interests the students, Every year, when students submit their "completed" projects, they say they spend an average of 50 hours outside the school day working on their projecta project for which no grade is ever assigned. Why? Isn't school about grades? Don't the red numbers at the top of the graded test paper motivate students to do their work? (2010 Kindle Locations 1932-1935) I would say Jacobs certainly accomplished her mission; she has inspired me to want to modernize my curricula, assessments and teaching tools. Combined with the teachings and inspiration I am receiving from Dr. Goldberg in Differentiated Instruction, Im excited about the unique opportunities for teaching in our day and age. Hayes did not address religious instruction; therefore, the religious teacher will have to use his imagination to adapt these methods and implementations into the classroom. This should not be difficult for the principles were very well explained and should be easy to incorporate.

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