Piloting a Dream: An Example of District-wide Curriculum Reform
Once the decision is made to focus on interdisciplinary curriculum devel opment—to truly reform the cur riculum of the middle school, not just remodel it—the key question becomes "how" does a large, urban school district begin, model, and sustain such an effort. After spending two years of meeting and planning with community members, local university staff, district administrators, teachers, and par ents, a state-of-the-art middle school con ceptual model was drafted, approved and funded by the school board of Wichita, Kan sas. The middle school implementation model, complete with interdisciplinary teams based on an academic core plan, both a team and separate personal planning period for all team teachers, an advisory program, intramurals and clubs, along with a host of other exemplary middle school programs, was implemented in the fall of 1989. Among the recommended curricular implementation guidelines was a focus on interdisciplinary curriculum development (ICD) as it was perceived at that time. A timeline was included as part of the model which required each teaching team to plan and implement one interdisciplinary unit the first year, three units the second year and an open agenda of units for the consecutive years with the hope that more and improved interdisciplinary curriculum units (ICUs) would begin to emerge. By the end of the first year the administrative, organizational, and curricular structures were in place to support these features. Also by the end of the first year of implementation, a review com mittee comprised of students, teachers, ad ministrators, parents, and local community representatives met to reflect on the progress that had occurred. While the program com ponents in place reflected the spirit and in tent of exemplary middle school practices, in reality they still reflected a traditional junior high school program format. The curricu lum was delivered in 40 to 45 minute class periods, textbook based, and presented pri marily by lecture. "Interdisciplinary" cur riculum was viewed by many teachers as something you stopped real school to do and then got back to teaching and learning later. Although academic teams met daily with opportunity to develop integrated units, this was not largely being done across the district's fifteen 6th-8th grade middle schools. Cur riculum continued to be presented to stu dents in a disconnected, segmented basis in the same fashion that it had been done before the advent of middle schools. Block-time schedules were not consistently developed or used while students and teachers were
Rethinking the Middle School Curriculum
progress in the last thirty years, particularly those having to do with devel oping more widespread awareness of the characteristics of early adolescence and reorganizing institutional features such as school climate. Important as these are, the movement has been seen by many as limited to these kinds of changes and, in fact, many schools presently involved in the initial stages of reorganization simply seek to replicate common structural features of other middle schools—inter disciplinary team organization, block schedules, advisory programs, activities programs, and so on. In this search for im proved middle level education a central question in this or any other kind of school reform has been obscured, namely, "What should be the planned curriculum of the middle school?" The importance of the "curriculum" question cannot be overestimated since it opens up the way to several key issues that are only partially addressed by structural reform. For example, if the middle school is to be based upon the characteristics of early adolescence, then the curriculum ought to be redesigned along developmen tally appropriate lines rather than simply a slightly revised version of the traditional high school curriculum. Furthermore, if "reform" means that the relations among schools, teachers, and young people are to be reconstructed, then the planned curriculum itself, as one of the powerful mediating forces in that relation ship, must also change. In other words, be ing sensitive to early adolescent character istics is only a part of "reform." The JAMES A. BEANE
Marie Curie's doctoral thesis: Prelude to a Nobel Prize
This paper is a critical account for the most significant body of Marie Sklodowska Curie's scientific work, presented in the hopes that she be remembered for more of the "right" reasons. It also offers some new insights into her methods and results.