Student Oriented Curriculum

Before this presentation, I had never heard of student oriented curriculum, but after today's presentation, I feel like I learned a lot and would be able to implement this into my classroom. I really love the idea of letting student's decide what they want to learn and being able to create how they learn it, although I do think something like that does leave a role up to the teacher to coach the students through the process, so they can achieve the most learning. As a student, I would have loved to do something like this in many of my classrooms, countless times I would want to learn certain things within a large unit, but we would never touch on the subject, or I wouldn't be able to learn based on how the lesson was being taught. So, being able to facilitate my own learning would have been beneficial to me as a student.

There were some parts of the presentation that I wish we had gone more in depth about, like more on the process of creating a lesson, or learning more about some of the assessments, but I think we could have had an entire week on this topic and still not learn everything there is to know about student oriented curriculum. I think my favorite thing that we talked about was how much planning on the end of the student goes into creating this student oriented lesson, with weeks of planning time, and class discussions about how things are going to be taught and done in class, with everyone in the class being encouraged to participate and bring their ideas to the table.

I personally would love to go out and try and find other examples of student oriented curriculum in the classroom, while the book highlights a success story, I would be interested to know if other schools have tried to implement this in their classrooms, and know if whether or not they experienced the same kind of success that this school did. This obviously is something that we wouldn't have had to do during the book talk, but it's something that might go out and try and search for myself, because this presentation peaked my interest in something that I have never heard of before.

Overall, I feel like this presentation really opened my eyes to something that I haven't heard something about before. It's something that I think would be really rewarding to bring into a classroom, and I'm glad that I got to learn about the different aspects of it. I think it's important for all students to have a chance to participate in a student oriented curriculum, as it would encourage them to take more opportunities and chances with their learning, even after the student oriented curriculum is over.