The recent controversy involving the Jefferson County school board has captured the interest of local and even national news outlets. The story has all the elements of great education drama: an over-reaching but adamant (and fairly elected) school board, students taking the streets in protest, arguments over the nature of what should be taught and how. This history content issue underscores several of the prevailing tensions in education right now: What content should be taught? Some argue that skill development is far more important and call for depth over breadth. But how to decide what exactly should be included, especially in regards to the history of our own nation? Regardless of what we teach, how do we know kids are actually learning? How do we measure their learning? How do we hold schools/teachers accountable? Who gets to decide?

 

Fortunately, working in an independent school, administrators and school leaders at Colorado Academy can make their own decisions regarding curriculum and its implementation. We are freed from partisan politics and federal intervention. We can evaluate what we are doing and why and can make careful but necessary adjustments along the way. For example, every year we examine the viability and desirability of offering Advanced Placement classes. Every teacher who offers an AP course is asked if he/she believes that course is still an appropriate and educationally sound way of challenging our most able students. If the answer is “yes,” we continue to offer that course.

 

Four years ago the main reason we dropped the AP U.S. history course had nothing to do with whether the content was “pro American” enough, but rather because it moved through the historical content at a breakneck speed. Students barely had time to digest the Boston Tea Party before they galloped into the after-effects of the Revolutionary War. (To their credit, the College Board has recently adjusted the curriculum for this subject; the test now emphasizes broader trends and themes rather than facts. We are reviewing this new format.)

 

In addition to regular curricular review, we are also keeping step with the latest pedagogical strategies. Among several recent initiatives, we have implemented more design thinking in our curriculum to connect students to real-world problems, welcomed performance tasks to increase students’ critical thinking, and embraced the hands-on learning of the maker movement.