OVERVIEW:  THE CURRICULUM LIBRARY

The Curriculum Library collection, the centerpiece of The Curriculum Cooperative, began with science before being expanded to the other three core subject areas.  It embodies a model for K-12 science curriculum and professional development that amalgamates six major approaches to science education (See “Summary of Doctoral Dissertation”, under Research and Resources tab).  This model emphasizes curriculum development, organization and coordination among grade levels.  Over 200 teachers contributed to the underlying model and design of the Curriculum Library, with the express purpose of developing a tool for teaching higher-order thinking.  This tool enables individual teachers to accomplish the systemic changes in science education described in the various national and state curriculum frameworks as well as many school-based programs for improving student learning.  Neither the underlying model nor the Curriculum Library is itself a curriculum.  Developed by teachers from six different states and many different school districts covering all K-12 grade levels, they are designed to coordinate and focus on-going practices and change efforts.

The Curriculum Library began as one of two major components of the underlying educational model and it will be described first.  The Curriculum Library is a computerized database of classroom-ready lessons and materials.  Its most important feature is its cataloguing scheme.  As mundane and arcane as cataloguing may be, it occupied the majority of the development time of the contributing teachers.  The questions were:  What are the educational criteria by which a classroom teacher, any teacher, could ideally specify a lesson for the next day's class?  Could a universal set of educational criteria be developed that would encompass the enormous variety of lessons?  How do the criteria for cataloging knowledge for the purposes of education differ from the criteria for archiving knowledge for future reference?

Seven major branches of educational criteria were identified for cataloging lessons: the transferable concept, the topic or content, the skill or process, the context of the lesson material, the student performance levels, instructional or assessment strategies, and, of course, the language in which the lesson is written.  Each of these seven major branches was further divided into more and more specific options.  In its final form, the Curriculum Library presents a series of cascading menus of the seven major branches and their sub-divisions.  Teachers choose from the menus to stipulate the type of lesson they are looking for.

For example, suppose that a teacher discovers that Jose and a group of friends are interested in archeology.  So she wants a lesson that applies the concept being taught, say composition, to archeology, which would be the topic or content area in which the concept of composition was embedded.  Since Jose’s family recently arrived from Puerto Rico, then the geographical context of the lesson would ideally be the Caribbean; its reading level might be at grade level, and perhaps the teacher would specify a group activity lasting a single class period.  Using these specifications, the Curriculum Library re-lists its collection of lessons and materials according to what were specified, presenting the teacher with a targeted list of lesson titles.  The title of the lesson closest to what was specified is highlighted, and the teacher may scroll up or down to lessons that are further and further away from this best-match.  The teacher might choose, for example, the lesson dealing with ancient whale skeletons found in Puerto Rico, whose differing compositions indicate how the surrounding oceans changed composition. 

Another teacher might choose a different lesson.  The strength of the Curriculum Library lies in the teacher’s easy ability to accommodate and modify lessons to circumstances.  Lessons can be chosen to accommodate to student background, interests and skill levels; to teacher preferences and strengths; to school environments; to interdisciplinary themes; to multi-grouped, heterogeneous classes; to individual students or any size group.  The Curriculum Library will empower teachers to reclaim control of the curriculum from the textbook.

The question that usually arises at this point is, Where are all these lessons going to come from?  Certainly public-domain lessons are included, but the Curriculum Library is intended to by a dynamic, growing collection based on a two-way flow of lessons among teachers.  Most lessons come from teachers, who submit their own curricular creations for use by their colleagues.  The process of submitting lessons is designed to be as easy as retrieving lessons.  Besides teachers, businesses could support the development of lessons pertaining to their industry with the confidence that they would be accessible to teachers who were looking for such a type of material.  Similarly, college professors would be able to contribute to classroom curriculum where their expertise best fit.  Lessons dealing with current events could be quickly disseminated to classrooms.  Thus the Curriculum Library provides teachers with a medium for the exchange of professional materials and gives businesses, community and parents a direct link to what is being learned in the classroom. 

The Curriculum Library is one of two major components of the 3-D model for school-based science curriculum.  Although the Library provides teachers with the necessary ability to accommodate curriculum to students and circumstances, on its own such an ability would not be sufficient to accomplish the desired level of higher-order thinking described in the various national and state frameworks or popular programs for increasing student learning.  The second major component is visible in the first major branch of educational criteria, the transferable concept.  Over one hundred and fifty transferable concepts of the physical and life sciences were painstakingly delineated, defined and assembled into a structure that mirrors how people learn intellectually.  This conceptual structure, or taxonomy, is based on neurobiology, epistemology, and a wide breadth of research in between.  By definition, a student's ability to apply such concepts to specific topics constitutes higher-order thinking. For students, learning to use the transferable concepts for critical thinking, problem solving and considered decision making involves applying them to a wide variety of content areas and contexts, using a wide variety of skills. Teachers can teach the same concept to all students, but in a wide variety of contents, contexts and instructional styles.

Over the span of the two decades required to develop the Curriculum Library and Coop, volunteer teachers used their classrooms to test the potency and efficacy of what the academic research indicated, cycling between academia and classroom until the conceptual structure was robust and practical in classrooms. The cognitively based structure of concepts in the Library is ideal for coordinating curricula from grade to grade while honoring a grade’s or teacher’s past practices.  The conceptual structure becomes a rudder that keeps teachers in a particular school or district coordinated in their various curricula but leaving ample space for individual strengths and creativity.

The Curriculum Library is thus part of a larger model.  Its design springs from a need felt by teachers attempting to teach their students higher-order thinking.  It is a tool that can enable all teachers to accomplish what is being asked of them, and do so within their present time and economic constraints.