CCR Announces Computer Science Pilot

Posted on January 15, 2019 by Charles

The Center for Curriculum Redesign (CCR) is pleased to announce it has received a grant from The Harold Alfond^® Foundation for a computer science pilot program at Waterville Senior High School. The pilot program furthers the Waterville Senior High School curriculum by providing students with computer science skills and experiences for success in an industry that is the number one source* of all new wages in the U.S.

The Foundation’s grant funds will support the design of “Cyber Panthers,” a one-credit elective, which introduces students to the breadth of computer science and provides opportunities for students to develop career paths within the field. Additionally, students will have opportunities for internships and interaction with a variety of partners from industry, higher education, and successful local organizations supporting the program.

CCR distinguishes its approach to curriculum development by:
• Providing the most up-to-date, rapidly evolving, real-world-centric, employer-vetted curriculum. Computer science topics covered during the course include: game development and design, apps development, augmented and virtual reality, blockchain and cyber security, and more.
• Encompassing entrepreneurship-driven, project-based approaches.
• Embedding CCR’s Four-Dimensional Education framework (aka “21st century skills” and social/emotional learning (SEL)) into the computer science curriculum. Through instruction and experience, students develop skills, character, and meta-learning abilities.

Charles Fadel, founder of CCR, stated, “CCR is delighted for this opportunity to serve the Waterville community with a leading-edge offering that brings together the hottest, in-demand discipline of computer science with the needs of employers, for applicability and development of 21st century skills. We are very grateful to the Harold Alfond® Foundation for its enlightened support and to the entire Waterville Senior High School team – board, administration, and faculty – for its leadership and vision.”

Waterville Public Schools Superintendent Eric Haley said, “Waterville Public Schools is dedicated to helping all students reach their academic potential while teaching real world life skills that are marketable in today’s business world. We feel strongly that this new initiative will engage students, increase their academic potential and better prepare them for the world of work and/or post-secondary education no matter what field of work or study they decide to pursue. We are very grateful to Charles Fadel and his Center for Curriculum Redesign for selecting Waterville Senior High School for this pilot program and to the Harold Alfond® Foundation for seeing the game changing importance of this work to provide a higher quality of life for many of our students.”

Principal Laramee from Waterville Senior High School stated, “The Cyber Panther initiative is an exciting opportunity for Waterville Senior High School and our community. This initiative is aligned to our school’s learning expectations and will benefit students by promoting student’s academic expectations, civic expectations, and social expectations. This initiative will help boost student engagement, increase student’s hope for the future, and provide students the career and financial literacy skills they are lacking. I feel strongly that the skills learned in this program will help promote student post-secondary aspirations and/or better prepare our students to begin their careers upon graduation.”

“It is more important than ever that we prepare our students for the age of a data economy,” said Gregory W. Powell, Chairman of the Harold Alfond® Foundation. “So we are delighted to be supporting this pilot initiative to introduce and provide the most relevant computer science education to Waterville’s young people.”

The pilot, which was approved unanimously by both the Waterville Curriculum Committee and the Waterville School Board, will begin in August 2019 for incoming freshman students.

The Harold Alfond^® Foundation’s mission focuses on furthering the legacy of philanthropist Harold Alfond by investing in education, health care, youth development, and other charitable causes that hold the promise of making enduring, transformative contributions to the community and state of Maine.

CCR is a non-profit global organization dedicated to improving education and openly propagating its recommendations and frameworks on a worldwide basis, via answering this question: “What should students learn for the 21^st Century?” CCR brings together international organizations, jurisdictions, academic institutions, corporations, and non-profit organizations including foundations. For more information about the program, Contact Us.

*(according to Code.org)

What makes the Waterville Sr. High School Computer Science Program Unique?

The course will encompass a broad curriculum not limited to just coding, but also computational thinking, artificial intelligence, and IT devices. It will also focus on real-world applications such as gaming and app development, augmented and virtual reality, cyber security and blockchain, and even applications in the Humanities and Arts, making the program more relevant and interesting to any student.
The course will be frequently updated to remain state-of-the-art in a rapidly changing technology, particularly about Artificial Intelligence.
The course builds “Identity, Agency, and Purpose” as a condition to learning for students. These qualities are developed by our partners such as: JMG, CGI, Waterville Senior High School, and the Harold Alfond Foundation.
Embedded throughout the curriculum is a comprehensive and deliberate development of skills, character, and meta-learning – the components of a 21st century education “four-dimensional” framework that provides students the knowledge and competencies needed to thrive in today’s (and tomorrow’s) world.
By the third and fourth year of the program, entrepreneurship will be included as a component of the program, providing students an additional expertise to nurture their talents to create opportunities after they leave high school.
The program is designed to incorporate projects and career path exploration. Local employers will support the program through job shadowing, internships, and mentoring to further instill material relevance and potential for career development.

#4DEdu #21stcenturyskills @CurrRedesign #Maine @wtvljhs @WatervillesSHS

CCR and South Africa’s NECT announce partnership

Posted on August 28, 2018 by Charles

The Center for Curriculum Redesign (CCR) and South Africa’s National Education Collaboration Trust (NECT) announced a partnership to develop 21st Century learning models and practices.

EdHub is the innovation unit within the NECT with an explicit mandate to promote and support innovation in education. It aims to coordinate innovation for 21^st Century education so that it can impact, at scale, the public basic education system in South Africa and ultimately improve education outcomes and quality of life for all.

A recently initiated channel within the EdHub is the establishment of the “21^st Century Schools Sandbox” initiative that intends to set up a laboratory for 21^st Century schooling models in the public sector, where various innovative models for teaching and learning can be trialed. Through the implementation of this project, a body of evidence will be gathered to assist in proving the case for the integration of 21^st Century teaching and learning practices into the South African public schooling system.

Godwin Khosa, CEO of the NECT, stated, “The CCR/NECT Partnership is ambitious yet practical, as we are playing in the transformation and not the improvement space. But we will keep focused on trialing and testing while feeding key findings into the basic education sector throughout the process.”

Charles Fadel, founder of CCR, added, “We are delighted to advise and assist the NECT with its EdHub/Sandbox initiatives to serve as a model for South African schools. The attachment to 21^st Century Competencies of Skills, Character, and Meta-Learning is both refreshing and leading edge.”

The NECT is an organization dedicated to strengthening partnerships between government, business, labor and civil society to achieve South Africa’s national goals for basic education. It strives both to support and influence the agenda to reform education through a variety of capacity-building interventions, monitoring and evaluation, research, and advocacy. With cross-sectoral governance spanning government, business, labor & civil society, the NECT is uniquely positioned to identify, enable and fast-track change in the basic education system.

CCR is a non-profit global organization dedicated to improving Education and openly propagating its recommendations and frameworks on a worldwide basis, via answering this question: “What should students learn for the 21^st Century?” CCR brings together international organizations, jurisdictions, academic institutions, corporations, and non-profit organizations including foundations. It focuses on designing and propagating new curricula and assessments.

@CurrRedesign @The_NECT #4DEdu

CCR and SOMOS Eduçao announce partnership

Posted on August 21, 2018 by Charles

The Center for Curriculum Redesign (CCR) announced a partnership with Somos Educação, the largest basic education group in Latin America, for the development of 21^st century competencies in its curriculum – which reaches over 30 million students in Brazil.

The Brazilian Ministry of Education recently released the country´s first mandatory curriculum, the “BNCC.” According to Renato Nunes Dias, head of Curriculum and Assessment at Somos, “the partnership with CCR will result in the delivery of a free platform for schools and teachers nationwide, offering them the tools to build their curricula, transforming 21^st century competencies into daily practice.”

Leticia Lyle, head of Somos Institute, said, “This opportunity to give back to our country is unique in our history. We are proud and pleased to be developing deep competencies of knowledge, skills and character and their mapping to the BNCC, including the embedding into disciplines such as Mathematics, Language, etc. Our partnership with the CCR, coupled with our innovative digital platform, are allowing us to develop curricula deeper and faster than at any time before, and make the BNCC vision a reality in the classrooms.”

Charles Fadel, founder of CCR, added, “In Somos, CCR has found a leading-edge, open-minded and progressive partner that understands that our four-dimensional (“4-D”) framework, available in 16 languages including Portuguese, is versatile and adaptable as well as detailed and actionable. We are delighted to be helping the BNCC and Somos comprehensively assist teachers and students to learn at their fullest.”

Both organizations expect that by September 2018 they will introduce the first instances of the free curriculum on the platform to test with teachers and students.

@CurrRedesign #4DEdu

CCR and ACARA announce design of world-leading K-12 Mathematics curriculum

Posted on July 24, 2018 by Charles

The Center for Curriculum Redesign (CCR) has partnered with the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) to design a world-class mathematics curriculum for K-12 schools that explicitly addresses the learning needs of students for life and work in the 21^st century.

CCR is leading math experts and practitioners from Australia, the U.S., and around the world to develop an exemplar world-class mathematics curriculum that any country could use to inform their own curriculum design. This is particularly timely as the OECD has embarked on deepening its Mathematics PISA 2021 assessment.

“This is a world first,” said Charles Fadel, founder of CCR. “We are taking the Australian Curriculum in Mathematics as a starting point because our international analysis shows it is already one of the best curricula worldwide. And we are now applying learnings from recent innovations in curriculum design and professional practice to ensure we modernize the content of mathematics, while also bringing in concepts, interdisciplinary learning and competencies (skills, character, meta-learning).”

“ACARA is pleased to be working with the CCR on this ground-breaking project,” said Robert Randall, CEO of ACARA. “We have a mandate to assemble evidence for reviewing, designing, and refining the Australian Curriculum. This joint project with the CCR will be used to inform any future refinement of the existing Australian Curriculum in Mathematics and to help guide improvements to ACARA’s overall curriculum design and development process.”

Andreas Schleicher, director of the OECD’s Education and Skills directorate, stated, “PISA 2021 will incorporate several new features: more focus on essential and relevant subjects and topics such as exponentials, emphasis on modern branches such as statistics/probabilities, and explicit attention to 21^st-century competencies such as reasoning, computational thinking, and resilience. I commend the CCR, our partner in Mathematics for the past 5 years, for leading this endeavor with a world-leading authority such as ACARA”.

The project draws on evidence collected and agreed on as part of the PISA Mathematics 2021 project, which CCR advised, including conferences in 2013 in Stockholm and in 2018 in Geneva. “It is now internationally recognized that the school curriculum needs to allow more time for deeper learning of discipline-specific content and 21st century competencies. In order to do that we need to selectively curate (add, emphasize, de-emphasize, or remove) curriculum content so that the core concepts and essential content are focused on that will best prepare students for life and work in our changing world,” said Charles Fadel.

@CurrRedesign #4DEd

“Knowledge for the Age of Artificial Intelligence” – CCR publishes landmark report and Knowledge framework

Posted on February 2, 2018 by Charles

The media world is suddenly awash with news about Artificial Intelligence, but CCR has been working on its impact – and that of many other global factors – and consequences for Education, for a decade. This work had led in 2016 to the publication of its recommendations for a Four-Dimensional Education framework (“4D”) described its book.

After 18 months of further research, CCR is delighted to offer its expanded Knowledge framework (+ appendix), describing how to rethink content in the age of algorithms (from search to A.I.) to build:

Relevance and personalization (for learner motivation)
Versatility (robustness to future uncertainties)
Transfer (actionability in real-world situations, leading to “flipping the curriculum“)

All of which are to be achieved via a deep redesign of disciplines and their content:

Modernizing/curating traditional disciplines (STEM, Humanities, Arts), via analysis of:
- Essential Content
- Core Concepts
- Learning progressions
Adding Modern Disciplines (Technology & Engineering; Media (digital journalism, cinema); Entrepreneurship & business; Personal finance; Wellness (physical, mental); Social sciences (psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, civics, future studies, etc.).
Developing Interdisciplinarity and Themes (Environmental, Global, Civic, Information and Digital Literacies; Systems, Design and Computational Thinking; etc.)
Intersecting with Competencies, the other three dimensions of the framework: (Skills, Character, Meta-Learning).

We remain as committed as ever to answering our seminal founding question “What should students learn for the 21st century?” in an age of AI and more… join us!