“How the Other Half Learns:” A Review (Part 2)
What happens inside classrooms remains beneath the notice of education policymakers and pundits. I have long believed that this indifference to curriculum and instruction is a significant impediment to progress.
Robert Pondiscio, How the Other Half Learns, p. 10
Inside classrooms is where teachers, students, curriculum, and instruction gel into lessons and daily activities. Pondiscio describes both Success Academy’s curriculum and instruction in great detail in selected classrooms. Teacher moves, academics, and emotions interact seamlessly as kindergarteners sit in circles on rugs and 4th graders struggle with or zip through math worksheets, according to the author. Pondiscio does readers a favor by describing in detail lessons he endorsed and ones he found disturbing.
While I separate curriculum from instruction in describing them in this part of the book review, anyone familiar with classrooms knows that they are joined at the hip in every lesson that teachers teach.
There is a single Success Academy curriculum that founder and director Eva Moskowitz expects principals and faculties in each one of the 47 schools to follow and use in daily lessons. It is this set curriculum and mode of instruction that, according to Pondiscio, accounts for the consistently high test scores registered by schools in the network (including intense preparation in the weeks before the state tests).
As Pondiscio observes most curriculum in schools is left to teachers to pick and choose from. “The default curriculum in American education, at least in CONTINUE READING: “How the Other Half Learns:” A Review (Part 2) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
