Banish the PowerPoint Curriculum

I’ve been read­ing Garr Reynolds’s book Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen (and am a fan of his blog, too). I picked it up because I wanted to improve my pre­sen­ta­tion and design skills, but in the process I’m see­ing some par­al­lels with cur­ricu­lum design.

We’re all famil­iar with the “Death by Pow­er­Point” scenario:

Some of the char­ac­ter­is­tics typ­i­cal of bad Pow­er­Point presentations:

• Slides crammed with content
• Mean­ing­less clip art, ani­ma­tions, and effects
• A super­flu­ous presenter
• Poor design based on stock templates

Pow­er­Point, used poorly, can crip­ple a pow­er­ful mes­sage. In fact, the use of Pow­er­Point as a com­mu­ni­ca­tion tool may even be partly to blame for the dis­as­ter that destroyed the Space Shut­tle Colum­bia.

Lazy cur­ricu­lum design can result in sim­i­lar problems:

• Course out­lines crammed with more mate­r­ial than can rea­son­ably be addressed in a year
• Mean­ing­less activ­i­ties and ancil­lary mate­ri­als added to make dry con­tent more “fun” or engaging
• “Teacher-​​proof” scripted les­son plans, and text­books con­tain­ing all the instruc­tion and explanation
• Poor design based on what all the other publishers/​districts have done before

The cure is the same for cur­ricu­lum as it is for Pow­er­Point presentations.

SIMPLIFY

Every year we add new con­tent to the cur­ricu­lum and rarely remove any­thing. With the abun­dance of infor­ma­tion read­ily avail­able to us in so many places, we need to strip cur­ricu­lum design of most of the details and focus on the core ideas, what Wig­gins and McTighe call Endur­ing Understandings.

As stu­dents explore the depths of these under­stand­ings and wres­tle with the essen­tial ques­tions we ask them, they will nat­u­rally seek out the other con­tent they need. Teach­ers can also bring in other resources as nec­es­sary to sup­ply infor­ma­tion stu­dents can’t find or don’t look for on their own.

CONSTRUCT MEANING

Every­thing built into a cur­ricu­lum must con­nect mean­ing­fully to lead­ing stu­dents towards under­stand­ing the core ideas we want them to develop.

Smoth­er­ing a dry, over­cooked, under-​​seasoned meat­loaf with ketchup doesn’t improve the meat­loaf at all. It just makes it eas­ier to choke down.

Cre­at­ing a bet­ter main dish may be a lot more work, but how much greater is the meal, and how much eas­ier is it to come back for sec­onds? If our cur­ric­ula con­nect with our kids in a deep and mean­ing­ful way, we won’t have to slap on the cute games and mean­ing­less dec­o­ra­tions to make them want to engage with it.

FOCUS ON INTERACTION

So much cur­ricu­lum today is designed in a way that the deliv­ery almost doesn’t mat­ter. It makes no dif­fer­ence which teacher presents it. In some cases, the teacher isn’t even nec­es­sary, with a thor­ough text­book, pre-​​fab self-​​correcting work­sheets, and com­put­er­ized activ­i­ties. Actu­ally, in most cases the class isn’t nec­es­sary either.

The real learn­ing should not be housed in the cur­ricu­lum, but in the inter­ac­tions that take place between stu­dents and teacher. Dis­cus­sion, prob­lem solv­ing, col­lab­o­ra­tion, dis­agree­ment, per­sua­sion, and con­sen­sus chal­lenge stu­dents to manip­u­late ideas.

Lan­guage skills aren’t learned in a vac­uum. Real com­mu­ni­ca­tion about real ideas and real prob­lems is what will build stu­dents’ skills in read­ing, writ­ing, speak­ing, and listening.

DESIGN

Cur­ricu­lum designers—and I argued recently that all teach­ers should con­sider them­selves in this category—need to under­stand prin­ci­ples of good design. Design is not just the ketchup on the meat­loaf. Design starts with fun­da­men­tal choices about the ingre­di­ents and their pro­por­tions. We need to con­sider uni­ver­sal prin­ci­ples of design, such as unity, bal­ance, har­mony, con­trast, pat­terns, pro­por­tion, func­tion­al­ity, scale, and even white space.

We will not find sim­pli­fied, focused, mean­ing­ful, thought­ful cur­ricu­lum by shop­ping the edu­ca­tion trade shows. We will not get a cur­ricu­lum which is a guide for both facil­i­tat­ing inter­ac­tions among stu­dents and pro­vid­ing a launch­ing point for a teacher to cre­ate a rich atmos­phere for learn­ing by pick­ing some­thing out of the pub­lisher cat­a­log. We can only get it when we learn how to cre­ate it our­selves so that we can take what is given to us and tear it apart, rethink it, redesign it, and make it work for us instead of allow­ing it to drive us.