So, he’s gone and said it! And about time too! Grant Wiggins, of Understanding by Design fame, has uttered some words about curriculum that will be music to many MYP teachers’ ears. In his latest blog, Wiggins takes us on an ‘Educational Thought Experiment’ (a kind of inquiry!) where we’re asked to imagine turning conventional wisdom of curriculum on its head: “…let’s see what results if we think of action, not knowledge, as the essence of an education.” In his description of this thought experiment, he asks us to think of content knowledge as the offshoot of education and not as the aim of it.
As many MYP teachers will have realized if they haven’t been told, the MYP unit planner is very much based on good educational practice including UbD, Differentiated Instruction and Teaching for Understanding. It provides a framework for the teacher/designer to bring together the major elements of a unit and then work backwards from there; “starting with the end in mind”, as Covey would say. The key part of the MYP unit planner is putting the content to be taught into a real-world context provided by an area of interaction and then designing a culminating assessment in which students can demonstrate their performance. This is exactly what Wiggins is talking about and what the MYP unit planner was meant to do. The focus is on student action and not on content. Content knowledge in the MYP is the ‘stuff’ teachers teach kids so that they understand better the underlying concepts. The other desirable effect of this approach is that schools are not required to teach a static body of content and this provides the programme’s flexibility in different school and curriculum systems. What Wiggins’ thought experiment does is push the areas of interaction (soon to be Global Contexts, so I hear) even more into the foreground as this is where the action component lies.
