Running Into the Future of Education

Last week we working with 7 amazing teachers from our program to write curriculum. This always leads me to thinking about planning for the classroom and how the work we are doing affects this task. Now I am not currently planning for a classroom of students as my planning involves my work with teachers, but this process somehow seems mystical for many. When I was starting in my own classroom many years ago, I was lucky enough to have many mentors helping me through some of this work especially as I transitioned to the world of education and alternative curriculum. Over time, my process evolved as I moved to different places and had to adapt to the expectations of each. The most recent version went something like this... explore the standards for the bimester (the 2 month grading periods we had in Mexico) and find the main themes. Explore both my own collection of resources as well as those found through blogs and websites for material for a unit project. Design the unit project and u...

As classes ended today and we have student led conferences left, I have moved on to yearly plans and first bimester (what a grading period is called here in Mexico) plans for next year. As I begin my journey into setting up an SBG classroom, I realized that my 1st step is looking through the curriculum and finding what standards I will work on during each bimester. I am using NCTM to help me with this as well since I need to translate from Spanish into English. I am also in the process of reorganizing the Mexican SEP curriculum into an order that will flow. Right now, they are integrating topics in a way that does not work well for me. I was given the go-ahead to reorder as long as I can show that I am still getting to all the ideas I should. After this, it is time to start finding #anyqs to create math stories with. I am using Dan Meyer's idea of the 1 acts as I plan these for math class. Also will probably use some in my physics class as well as other hands-on explorations. ...