\u201cChaos can be extremely good news.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It slams us up against old patterns that hold us back.<\/span><\/p>\n

Before the pandemic, we were long overdue for a serious closet clean out when it comes to what we teach in our schools. One old pattern needing our attention is that of holding on to what we have always taught. In my decades of work with middle schools, no matter what city or state, we always seem to add more and delete almost nothing.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Even with the advent of 21st century skills, or what we call in Vermont, transferable skills, we have had a hard time letting go of our volumes of content. While we value the attention to transferrable skills, it turns out they still don\u2019t rank above the books we have always taught, the units we love, and the archives we inherited.<\/span><\/p>\n

After the Common Core declared it had cut back content load in math, I was hopeful. Yet little changed in the volume of middle school mathematics. We are all still buried in way too much to teach.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Mile Wide and Inch Deep Curriculum<\/h3>\n

While teachers often share that they\u2019d love to change this, they feel pressed to prepare students for the tests.\u00a0 One science teacher told me she had to cover 65 topics in 42 days. Speedy curriculum coverage was once translated into curriculum by mentioning, \u201cI mentioned it, so I am moving on\u201d, sustaining the yet untouched mile wide, inch deep United States curriculum.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Knowledge keeps growing, expanding and changing. The \u201cKnowledge Doubling Curve\u201d, as it\u2019s now known, was created by Buckminster Fuller in 1982. Fifty years ago, we were told that we were witnessing a knowledge explosion. Human knowledge was doubling every 13 months. <\/span><\/p>\n

Today, with the help of the Internet, we face the doubling of knowledge every 12 hours.\u00a0 To put it into context, in 1900 human knowledge doubled approximately every 100 years. By the end of 1945, the rate was every 25 years.\u00a0 It\u2019s 2022.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s been said that \u201cfacts are stubborn things,\u201d but maybe not as stubborn as we think. New facts are replacing outdated ones at an accelerated rate as the tsunami of data continually yields new discoveries and information. It\u2019s time to change.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Discernment, critical thinking, and relevance<\/h3>\n

COVID offers a superb example of the dramatically changing nature of knowledge as our collective understanding of the virus, the vaccines, the protective measures\u2026. you name it, changed dramatically and fast. Achieving consensus about COVID truths often feels like \u2018trying to nail Jello to a tree.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

We have been called to be nimble with ever changing information. We have witnessed the public\u2019s struggle with deciphering truth: distinguishing fact from opinion, remaining open to new truth, and seeking to really understand.<\/span><\/p>\n

Most importantly, we need a curriculum dominated by attention to lifelong learning skills and a hardy respect for the ever-changing nature of knowledge. Specifically, our students need our help learning to access and evaluate a wide array of knowledge and to decipher fact from opinion. Our students need abundant opportunities to put knowledge to work in real ways.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n