crayola curriculum

source:
Making Curriculum Meaningful
21st Century Collaborative


The term "crayola curriculum" appears to have originated with Mike Schmoker.

More on the crayola curriculum from Donna Harrington-Lueker:

Talk to teachers, review messages posted on e-mail groups and browse professional journals, and you'll find high school assignments that are long on fun and remarkably short on actual writing.

For example, someone who teaches an honors class for high school freshmen posts a short-story project that allows students 13 options, only a handful of which involve actual writing. Among the choices students are offered: create a map to illustrate the story's setting, make a game to show the story's theme, put together a collage from magazine photographs, or assemble a scrapbook or photograph album for the character.

Teaching Arthurian literature? Have your students design a coat of arms. Need an alternative to a book report? Have students draw the design for a book jacket.

While such activities may be more entertaining for students, and less work for the teachers in terms of grading the projects, kids are often showing up at college unable to write.

[snip]

Nor are English teachers the only ones at fault. Students don't appear to be writing substantively in other classes either, says Will Fitzhugh, editor of The Concord Review, a journal of academic writing for high school history students.

Fitzhugh's evidence is anecdotal: Too often, he says, high school writing is creative and "entirely self-referential" (involves students' writing about themselves). And with all of the anxiety about plagiarism on the Internet, teachers appear to be assigning few if any research papers — at least not the rigorous 20-page analyses that Fitzhugh's journal publishes. Recent papers selected for publication include such serious titles as "The Outcome of that Discontent: Oscar Micheaux, Motion Pictures and the Race for Dignity" and "The Treason Debate: Ezra Pound and His Rome Radio Broadcasts."

Still another culprit is the fascination with PowerPoint presentations, Fitzhugh says, which typically involve spiffy graphics and soundtracks paired with a single sentence, perhaps a paragraph or a bulleted list of items rather than sustained analysis.

If high schools are really serious about turning out students who can write well, they have to do more than supply their teachers with red pens. They have to think seriously about class sizes and workloads. If an average English teacher sees 150 students a week, assigning even a 10-page research paper means having to read and critique 1,500 pages. A 20-page paper — the kind Fitzhugh is accustomed to printing — is nearly impossible.

Under such circumstances, maps, collages and posters make sense: They're easier to grade, and they don't raise nearly the fuss a research paper would.