ICI Integrated Curriculum and Instruction

What is a 21st Century Thinking Curriculum?

A “thinking curriculum” goes beyond competency. Not only is it standards-driven, when implemented it develops what Art Costa has termed The Habits of Mind. A thinking curriculum:

helps students know more about the world and the diversity of language, culture and belief.
develops divergent thinking, problem exploration and persistence.
helps students learn to evaluate information for accuracy and reliability.
supports student's "Thinking and communicating with clarity and precision."
promotes student flexibility in using a variety of technological tools and applications.
builds mutual respect and cooperation.
makes cross-content connections and life applications.
fosters humor and that response to elegant patterns in nature, art or mathematics with "wonderment and awe."

Recently about 25 social studies teachers in a high performing school gathered to drill down to student specific data. Looking at over 400 student Regents’ exam papers, they found that by and large students answered the Document Based Question portion of the exam consistently. When asked in Part A to summarize the main idea of each of the 8 documents provided or to cite specific facts from the documents, they could easily respond correctly. However, when asked to write an essay in Part B where they had to draw inferences and support their positions with citations from some of the documents, they uniformly performed much lower. The teachers hypothesized that most classroom tasks were at the comprehension level in Bloom’s taxonomy, but they need to explicitly teach the higher order thinking of analysis, synthesis and application and how to express that thinking in clear, ordered writing.

So, a thinking curriculum is one that is organized around promoting students’ intelligent behavior. That is, teaching and learning is organized so that students not only are engaged at the higher cognitive levels, but also are encouraged to be inventive and imaginative. Students learn to make meaning in multiple ways. Across content areas and in any temporary ability grouping, students develop the habits that characterize experts in any field--professional autonomy, quality performance and accountability. ICI is committed to deep and joyful learning for every student pre-K to 12 through the implementation of a 21^st century thinking curriculum.

ICI® Integrated Curriculum and Instruction
Sustainable Leadership
Quality Teaching
Student Achievement
Our children are already global citizens. They are children of the digital age. They adapt to changing technology with ease. Just ask any parent whose child is clamoring for the latest MP3 player or cell-phone. Children in kindergarten today will be inventing the tools of tomorrow. And invention is the product of creative teamwork and "thinking outside the box." To help our children navigate information to create new knowledge, we need to spark their imaginations. We need to invite kids to explore problems in many different ways. We need to support their playing with ideas through the arts, through mathematics and through stories. We need expert K-12 teachers who themselves are life-long learners and who can teach kids to make connections across content areas:

As Hannah Arendt says:

“Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it … . And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their choice of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.”

Sustainable Leadership
Leaders and schools generally fall along a continuum from dependency to autonomy. Autonomous schools and their leaders possess high degrees of consciousness, community or systems thinking, precision, flexibility, and efficacy. (See Bocchino, conscious Leadership and selected Region3 workshop materials).

Leaders who are conscious interpret all kinds of data or input and discern the consequences, both intended and unintended, of their decisions. They can also predict the effects on a system of action or inaction. (See Hargreaves on Sustainability; and Fullan in The Moral Imperative of School Leadership).

Thus, leaders act in the best interests of the school, of neighboring schools and the system. Further, they are precise in their diagnoses of data, making fine distinctions about practice. Autonomous leaders have a wealth of tools at their disposal so that they can be flexible in courses of action to meet all their goals for students and others. Finally they are efficacious. They embrace accountability and resolve to ensure deep and joyful learning with the resources they have and barriers they face.

Within peer learning teams, principals might consider:

What mutual support can principals expect from a support organization and from each other in looking at classroom practice, culture, student work in order to create and execute a data-driven plan?

As leaders with a moral imperative to serve all children, how can we influence the larger system and make decisions grounded in the principles of sustainability?

Quality Teaching
Teaching is decision-making. In fact, researchers (Hunter, Joyce and Showers, Marzano, Garmston, Costa et al) define teaching as “a constant stream of conscious decisions which when implemented, affect the probability of learning.” Only the teacher can make informed choices about what to teach and how to teach it.

A quality teacher makes more diagnoses in any given day than a physician. More decisions than a judge. More analyses of behavior than a psychologist. A quality teacher questions as artfully as a trial lawyer. Manages student work as effectively as a corporate vice president. Uses language with the precision of a poet. A quality teacher resolves conflict with the skill of a mediator. Motivates better than any self-help guru. Monitors student efforts with the eye of a top NBA coach. And, like a consummate performer, makes it all look effortless. How? Like any other professional, quality teachers are successful because the bulk of their efforts are spent in planning, practicing and reflecting.

We already know a tremendous amount about how the human brain learns. For example, emotion is the key to learning, and if students are not in a caring, safe environment, they can and will shut down. As well, there are what Madeline Hunter termed “Essential Elements of Instruction,” that is, teacher decisions that can and do affect the learner’s brain and increase the likelihood of learning. For example, expert teachers choose among a variety of strategies to engage student interest, to encourage deep thinking and to help students retain, transfer, apply and evaluate what they have learned. They monitor student learning to determine students’ readiness. They activate prior knowledge before introducing new learning. Finally, they clearly define measurable goals for all students and assess student progress.

Specifically this means that the New York City Performance Standards and the New York State Learning Standards set the goals for every student to achieve. Using these goals, teachers, like the social studies teachers above, move students from their current level of performance towards standards-meeting or exceeding work. As part of their planning, these expert teachers identify individual or groups of students’ needs and provide differentiation.

One way to look at differentiation is the teacher use of time, resources, supplemental teaching, or “leveled assignments.” That is, teachers set individual interim expectations of accountability for special Ed or ELL students for example. They give more or less time to learn and perform a task based on student need and current fluency. They offer temporary grouping or co-teachers or paras or glossaries or leveled non-fiction libraries or multi-media or technology to ensure that every student has accessible materials and resources. Meeting the standards is the long-term expectation for all students. Learning along the way is individualized.

In sum, quality teaching is about diagnosing students, careful backwards planning from standards, providing appropriate, engaging tasks and monitoring learning. That is the basis for success for each student, gifted, general education, ELL or special education.

Student Achievement
It is the expectation that every student pre-K to 12 will successfully meet promotional standards and graduate from high school fully able to pursue a wide variety of choices in a democratic society. No excuses. And, each student is unique in his or her talents and inclinations. Each possesses what Howard Gardner calls multiple intelligences to different degrees. So called “objective measures” are difficult to overlay on creativity, as anyone addicted to Top Chef or American Idol can understand. ICI is committed to authentic student achievement across content areas and in real-world applications. ICI supports multiple measures of student learning while ensuring that every student also is successful on State and City assessments. Quality teaching can ensure student success.

Standardized test scores can tell us something about how students and schools perform. Unfortunately these assessments are limited in what they can measure. As a result, students who have mastered deep learning and students who have merely learned sophisticated test taking skills may perform equally well on these tests. At the same time, “test scores” are not good indicators of success in either higher education or in life. What a recent Meta study by McREL shows is that students who are taught a rich, engaging curriculum outperform their counterparts on standardized tests, and, more importantly, learn more deeply than can be measured by on-demand tests alone.

Recently, an ASCD policy brief called on the federal government to develop a more sophisticated measure of student success. We understand that students demonstrate achievement by meeting City and State Standards and by developing habits of life-long learners. To measure deep and joyful learning, we need to look at student engagement daily in classrooms. We need to celebrate their work and encourage participation in public performances and competitions. We need to examine student work products in response to tasks that are meaningful and challenging.