​So how can we return to a little bit of the one room schoolhouse feel?  How can we provide to our learners an opportunity to have some say in their day while maintaining the necessary control and accountability for hundreds in our school?
 
Curriculum Mapping - with the use of a Learning Management System - is one place to start. 
 
We must be clear about what we want our learners to know and be able to do.  This is simply good curriculum and curriculum mapping.  I learned this years ago from Dr. Heidi Hayes Jacobs (Read more here: http://www.curriculum21.com.) 
 
There is a 13-year progression (Kindergarten through 12th Grade) that our learners experience as they move through our system. How do we house the curricula (K-12) in a place that is easily accessible to our learners and their parents?  How can we make it crystal clear what our learners must know and be able to do to master the material in a unit? 
 
A curriculum map offers this information, and a learning management system helps effectively communicate it to everyone on the learner's team.  

We must give  parents access to information they can use to engage with their children about their school work - and the ability to see their child's successes and opportunities for growth.  Curriculum mapping and a learning management system  also  put an end to a child telling his parent, “I did nothing in school today” or “I have no homework.” 

Let's face it --  it has never been easy to be a parent.  But, today's schools can leverage technology to make parenting a school-aged, digital learner easier. If there is a list of standards or some common core version in your state, why is it such a secret to our students, and even harder for our parents to access? If we have the technology, and a learning management system, why can't parents know more detailed information about how their children are doing in school on any given day, with any given unit? 
 
If we are working on a unit in physics on velocity vectors, we can use a map that shares the standards, what our learners must know and be able to do, and a final project to calculate the distance that you would drift downstream while swimming across a river that is flowing four meters per second.  The map can also include information to assist the learner,  such as additional reading resources or videos that explain or demonstrate the concept. 
 
What if we allowed (really encouraged) a learner to think of another way to demonstrate velocity vectors?  They would need to present their idea to the teacher for approval, then begin.  We might be amazed at what they can do, given enough leeway to self-organize their learning!

The first step toward increasing student agency falls squarely on the big people in the organization.  Curriculum mapping and a learning management system are an important start, but there is much work to be done in other areas of our system!  We invite you to share your thoughts with us on today's blog, or any topic related to customizing education for our learners. How do you think we can give students more voice and choice in their education? Or parents more access to information needed to support their children in school? 

Think about how we, as adults, organize our daily lives. From the moment we wake each morning, many of us:

• Check our social media status and calendar
• Respond to emails from a portable device, usually a phone
• Review our schedules on the same device
• Check a weather app or “Ask Siri” if we will need an umbrella today
• Check out the latest news via a favorite news app or review whatever our RSS Feed has pushed to us since last night.

 
And, for a good number of us, this all happens before we even take one step out of bed in the morning. You see, as adults, we self-organize and self-determine our daily work and life activities using technology and involving other humans as we see fit. 
 
Yet where or HOW did we learn to balance using technology with the human element?

It certainly did not happen during our public education experiences. Think back to your school days. If they were like mine, you were told what to do. Handed a worksheet. Given a “Review Packet” before the big test. As an adult, when you hear a bell ring, you likely flashback to images of hundreds of your classmates and you filing into a crowded hallway and rushing to the next class before the late bell sounded. (This was the early version of the “Information Super Highway!”)
 
There was little to no self-organization, or student agency as we refer to it today in our schools.  It's not your fault nor was it mine; it is just the way schools were organized in the early 1900s, when more and more children in this country began to attend school. Enter the Industrial Era of schools, the stacking and racking of students by their manufacture dates. Efficiency reined supreme when it came to designing the educational experience.
 
Today, as we explore customizing education or the powerful combination of technology and the human element, we’re really talking about returning to that pre-Industrial Age one-room schoolhouse feel. We’re reimagining education so that operational efficiency and accountability do not override what’s best for our learners. We’re talking about how to give learners more opportunities to self-organize – without giving up the control and accountability we need in a school with hundreds of learners.
 
We believe there are ways we can make a dent in the lock-step approach to public education, and we are excited to start talking about these with you in the coming weeks. From Curriculum Mapping, to Voice & Choice to Structures, we will be writing and talking about three areas that can help us recapture the one-room feel for our learners.
 
Stay tuned … and share your thoughts with us, starting with this: What do you believe is the “Ideal Learning Experience” for today’s students? And what do we need to do to make it so?