May 17, 2020

Agent Lauren Porosoff (Meaningful Curriculum)

29 minutes

Your lesson, should you choose to accept it, is to put students’ own values at the center of their learning in order to make school meaningful beyond academic skills. The special agent assigned to help you with this task is Lauren Porosoff of Scarsdale, New York.

A transcript is available for this episode.

In this episode we discuss:

Parents advocating for meaningfulness

The three kinds of relevance: personal, practical, cultural

Her favorite meaningful units: A Midsummer Night’s Dream & spoken word poetry

Addressing three criticisms of making curriculum meaningful: kids need to learn that not everything is about them, there’s no time to get to know students, and young people don’t know what is meaningful to them yet

What to do if a teacher wants to change their curriculum

Feeling lonely or disempowered while innovating

ACT: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

Her decision to no longer teach Sherman Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary of A Part-Time Indian

How to get in touch with Lauren

Links:

Lauren’s Twitter, Facebook and Website

Book: Two-for-One Teaching: Connecting Instruction to Student Values

Book: Empower Your Students: Tools to Inspire a Meaningful School Experience

Article: “A Midsummer Night’s Gender Diversity”

Article: “Why I’ll Never Teach This Powerful Book Again”

For more about ACT: The Association for Contextual Behavioral Science

If you want to find out more about what innovative educators are doing around the world, check out www.lessonimpossible.com. And if you like the podcast, please consider rating, reviewing and subscribing or forwarding it to a colleague. You can also follow Lesson: Impossible on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

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