Teachers and Students Create the Curriculum
Curriculum does not only include the content provided by the school district or the state. It includes what is created in the classroom - using what students ask and what the teacher decides to include. The discussions in the classroom contribute to what the curriculum is, and this information is created by the students and the teachers. It is also how students understand the world and what they believe their place should be.
01
Global Conflict Tracker
Throughout our civics unit, we discussed several different countries and their governments. After going through them together, we did an assignment based around the World Conflict Tracker, a website which highlights important world events that are currently happening. With this assignment, students went onto the World Conflict Tracker website and took some time to explore the events. After looking through the options, students could choose which country and event to focus on and learn more about. By choosing what topic they wanted to do the assignment on, my students were creating the curriculum. They were choosing what topics to learn about and what they don't want to know more about.
After choosing the event, students went to that webpage and read about the event and looked at a map showing where it was occurring. After reading, students filled out the worksheet that can be seen on the left. The questions help summarize what they read about. At the end of the assignment, the last question is an open-ended opinion question, where students had to critically think about their answer. This assignment gave students a choice about what they wanted to learn, which helped create the curriculum in our classroom.
02
European Holidays
Similar to the assignment above, with our European Holidays assignment, students were given the opportunity to research a holiday of their choice that is celebrated in the country they were assigned to. By assigning them different countries, it helped get a variety of different holidays, however, the students still had a choice of what they wanted to learn more about. Students worked on this individually and filled in the slides on the template that was given to them. Students used the internet to do research on their holiday. They were given a few websites to help them start, but they were also encouraged to branch out and look for additional resources.
After having time to work on their slides, students shared out to the class about their holiday. They didn't have to stand up and present them, but we went around the class, and everyone shared an interesting fact they had learned. The topics we talked about were driven by what the students had found as they had worked. This created what the students were learning about in the classroom.
03
Ukraine and Russia
One of the topics my students expressed interest in learning about was the tension between Ukraine and Russia. This was a subject that was brought up at the beginning of our civics unit when I asked my students what they wanted to know more about. When they brought it up, it was right around the time that everyone was anticipating an attack, but nothing had happened yet. We managed to plan this lesson just after Russia attacked, so the students were very interested in the event. We created a slideshow giving an overview of what was happening and included the most recent information to make it as accurate as possible. We used our students' leading questions to design the lesson to tailor it to their curiosity. With this lesson, we listened to what our students wanted to learn about and worked it into fitting into our government unit. We discussed the types of governments they had, while learning about what had been currently happening in the world. This was how my students and I created our curriculum prior to and even during our lesson.