Great food for thought here, so let me copy/paste my Diigo highlights and annotations (and pardon any tone/snark that may creep in, as I was grumpy inside Diigo’s too small annotation input fields).

But before I do that, let me note that I read in your “About” page that you’re into “Big Picture” learning. I’m into “Big Picture” teaching in my history classes, and consciously enforce that notion in my class wikis: “Europe: The Big Picture” and “China: The Big Picture.”

I say that because as a high school history teacher, I do want my students to have that big picture that I never got until well into my 20s. Its lack made much literature and philosophy far less comprehensible and worse, far less rich, for lack of the historical context.

Now to the granulars:

You write:

A content driven approach to school ends up being a “race to the end,” the end of the book that is. The reason this occurs is the mistaken assumption that everything printed in a textbook or curriculum guide or standards list has been thoughtfully placed there. Do teachers pause and ask, “Why am I teaching this?” What about administrators? The thinking behind content driven curriculum is that it is all “necessary” for a complete education.

My reply:

I ask myself that question every time I start a unit. And I go far beyond the textbook in designing that unit.
It’s not so much a “race to the end” as a designed pace to, yes, cover the passage of time — as a _survey_, which any good teacher explains is a simplified _overview_ meant not as an _end_, but as a _beginning_ to lifelong explorations of the terrain surveyed — so that students leave the course with a _coherent_ understanding of that terrain.
I know that’s traditional, but it’s efficient and effective, done well. It’s harder to get “the Big Picture” without a single, coherent guide in human form mentoring you throughout a year of planned study. I would need serious persuading that a student with a laptop would do better in gaining that Big Picture more efficiently.
The examples from textbooks and Scott’s quiz stuff are good examples of bad teaching. Good teachers know that, yes?

You write:

My students already spent tremendous amounts of time at night in AOL Instant Messenger, so I appropriated the technology. Once a week each group engaged in an AIM conversation (outside of the classroom) which revolved around three seed questions I provided. The group them emailed the transcript of the dialog to me.

My reply:

I’m unclear. How is this not a content-driven race to the end of the book? Why not just let the students read it if interested? I know this sounds snarky, but you organized and assigned the learning materials and outcomes. What am I missing?

You write:

The point? It didn’t matter what book I used, the content was value neutral to the process. I could just as easily have designed a similar project in Math, Science, or Social Studies. It was about the process and not the content.

My reply:

It sounds fine, but how is it a superior learning experience to the content of Math, Science, or SS? And are the two mutually exclusive?

You write:

Content needs to become fluid allowing teachers to use various, seemingly disparate, content pieces to facilitate the learning of processes. I always said that the process I wanted my two children to learn in their first three years of school was, reading. If they learned that process well, they could learn anything they wanted to, as deeply as they wanted to. Let’s make process the engine upon which schools run and let the students play with content.

My reply:

I think Neal Stephenson’s input in the original thread about what he called “liberating constraints” and (what he roughly called) “content expert guides” are important concepts to add here. (See his full post at his own blog)

I agree about the necessity of reading as the doorway to learning “anything they want,” but a good teacher supplies that want in ways self-direction can’t: through the enthusiastic and transformative Art of Teaching. And granted, many teachers don’t excel at this art.

I didn’t want to learn a lot of stuff until a teacher had me as a captive audience, and persuaded me that the stuff was something I did want to learn — because s/he made it interesting.

Your serve

And happy new year.

(And I hope your comment box takes html!