Upgrade Your Curriculum: Practical Ways to Transform Units and Engage Students, March/2013

Because mandates alone aren't going to help your school implement new curriculum standards, you need this book's plan for empowering and enabling teachers to successfully upgrade units of study. Inspired by our best-selling book Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World, edited by renowned curriculum expert Heidi Hayes Jacobs, Janet A. Hale and Michael Fisher describe how to upgrade curriculum to embrace modern-learning environments that engage students in higher-order thinking tasks, make local and global connections, and incorporate appropriate technology. Explore a transformational process in which teachers work collaboratively to modify current curricular elements to create meaningful and engaging learning experiences. And learn how to use the authors' transformational matrix to focus faculty on student learning and engagement and use web-based tools to increase student ownership of learning. Included in the book are detailed grade-level "snapshots" that show how practitioners across all grade levels and subject areas have used the transformational process to upgrade their curriculum and instructional practices so that students acquire the 21st century learning skills they need to succeed in school and in life.