Serendipity in Curriculum Design

 . . . developing themes for Project-Based Learning units.  

Today I came across an interesting blog post by Terry Heick entitled "How to Kill a Student's Curiosity in 12 Easy Steps."  One of the steps was . . .  "Focus on standards blindly. . .  and do so with brutal efficiency".  

As you know, most professional development and curriculum design consultants will tell you to always start with the standards when beginning to develop a PBL unit.

My contention is that you should NOT begin with the standards!  They are very important, and we certainly do ensure that they are learned by all students (notice I used the word "learned", not "taught").  In fact, using the 21st Century Schools method for designing and delivering PBL will actually have your students learning at higher levels (and a great by-product will be higher test scores)!

Why do I say that you should not begin with the standards?  Because if you do, you will necessarily miss out on some incredible ideas and opportunities to create rich curricular experiences for your students.  By focusing only on the standards as you begin to develop curriculum you are, in effect, putting on a set of blinders.  And the result is that you will have stopped short of designing a truly extraordinary learning event!

For example, the other day I decided to check on what special days take place during the month of May.  There are several excellent web sites that list all kinds of interesting special days and monthly themes.  May is National Barbeque Month, National Bike Month, National Salad Month and several others.  And in May we can celebrate Mother Goose Day, Star Wars Day, World Red Cross Day and many more.  One of these sites is Holiday Insights, where I discovered Frog Jumping Day which is celebrated on May 13.

I thought that Frog Jumping Day sounded pretty interesting, and in no time at all I had generated all kinds of possibilities for a very relevant, real world and rigorous PBL curriculum. You can see below the process I use to begin exploring a theme. Our Frog Jumping Day page contains the results of my brief exploration.

Would I ever have thought of these possibilities if I simply looked at the standards?  No!  But, after exploring and brainstorming possibilities, using Frog Jumping Day as a starting point (jumping off place), I can then easily see where so many standards can be taught - meaningfully!

Don't rule out serendipity, be creative and don't limit yourself to just the standards.  Our students deserve more than that!

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