Great Books

There's a lot of extreme talk about Common Core being voiced, and it's a problem because it it is clouding serious-minded criticism about the standards initiative and its implementation.

The phrase “great books” has an odd resonance in Chicago. Why? Because it has a specific meaning — and a specific history in the Windy City.

Critical thinking questions based on Common Core skills help students "think and write like a historian." It's a great resource for use in the classroom, and serves as a model for teacher or student curation of historic content into interactive digital DBQ's.

This 18-page iPad DBQ guides students through the historian's process. "Stop and think" prompts encourage a deep reading of many notables of the Gilded Age - including Russell Conwell, Henry George, Andrew Carnegie and Stephen Crane. Visual source material includes posters, 1908 Sears Catalogue, a gallery of photographs by Lewis Hine and video of one of Edison's early Vitascope films.

Many colleges and universities across the nation have Great Books curricula, but unfortunately, all too often, these curricula are not inclusive and merely showcase Western thinkers and mainly men.

Laura Thomas argues that progressive educators have become so accustomed to the burden of instructional mandates that they may be missing opportunities presented by the common standards.

How do we incorporate the Common Core's complex texts in a way that students will read, engage with, debate, and discuss? Join us as we explore non-freaked implementation.

Students learn about reading and literacy through movement and rhythm
Gainesville Times
The arts-integrated lessons focus on teaching children how to retell and “move through a story,” from the beginning to the middle and then the end.

At Zaytuna College in California, the Greeks, the scholastics and the whole Western tradition are being taught alongside the Koran.

Collaboration has gone Google. Create a story and then share your video.

Clay Shirky observed at the Awl last week that he and I disagree over whether the trend toward MOOCs in higher education is reversible—he says no, and he says that I say yes—and I suppose he’s right, so far as that goes. But I don’t think that goes very far.There were a few cheap shots about “teamsters in tweed” that were worth noting. A lazy trope that depends on the belief that unions are essentially illegitimate, selfish, and retrograde, it’s a sly dig that lets him insinuate without directly asserting that anti-MOOC academics are self-interested and conservative luddites, that we are somehow positioning our own self-interest in opposition to the deep public spirit of Silicon Valley. It also passes along the insinuation that academics are powerfully unionized, which is far from the truth; as Jonathan Rees points out, would that we were more like teamsters.

But I’d just like to note the cheapness of that critique before moving on: as if self-interest is some unique academic perversion, as if Shirky himself lacks bread and a knowledge of which side it is buttered on, and—most importantly—as if the drive to make money off of students isn’t the only reason Silicon Valley is getting on the MOOC bandwagon. Because, of course, this was my original critique of Shirky’s language of “we educators”: he rhetorically inhabits that position in order to pooh-pooh its legitimacy as an opinion. He signs up for team education in order to run up the white flag on our behalf. Thanks, but, please, no thanks.

Occupational training is not Gutenberg’s ultimate goal. Our ultimate goal is for our students to seek and embrace truth. But there are fringe benefits to that goal. Those fringe benefits — especially today — make great books students especially attractive to employers.