Subject: Curriculum - middle school (disease?)

Posted by John Heinbokel on 12/7/2005
In Reply To:Collaboration on Curricula Posted by Florence Duarte on 11/19/2005

Message:

Florence (and others),



I’m only now catching up to e-mail obligations that I put on hold to deal with other responsibilities. I’m sorry it took so long to respond to your note (copied below).



To start with, I’m curious about a couple things:

-- Which ‘standard’ model for disease did you use? The “Shape of Change,” published by CLE has a neat play-acting simulation, and we presented a slightly different variation that can be found on the CLE site (http://www.clexchange.org/search/cle_docsearch.asp?type=Author&category=alldocs&year=All&searchstring=John+Heinbokel+and+Jeff+Potash&comp_type=&key1=All&key2=All&key3=All) and that progresses through causal loops and stock-flow diagrams and finishes with computer simulation. Both are based on an earlier unit created by Will Glass (now Glass-Husain) when he was an undergraduate at MIT.

-- What is the “TfU pedagogical framework”?



Our experience has been that middle school is a powerful and rewarding place to engage students with SD ‘stuff.’ They’re developing enough experience and beginning to develop better abstract and mathematical reasoning skills so that developing and extrapolating generic illustrations – whether using computer simulations or not – is becoming more rewarding. Their curricula are also not so tightly bound up in the disciplinary blocks that can limit high school learning.



So when you look ahead to developing or utilizing applications at the middle school level, are you looking at disease specifically, or is that just one illustration in a broader set of possible topics?

-- If the former: we’ve played extensively with disease as an interdisciplinary teaching topic, albeit much at the college level (see http://www.ciesd.org/pdf/atlanta-paper.pdf). In addition, the conversation strand begun in this ListServe by Dan Burke might be place where at least the biological aspects of disease might also be developed.

-- If the latter, are there units available, say at the CLE, that need to be adapted to meet your specific needs or do you visualize wanting or needed to build units from scratch? In either case, if there’s not a convenient disciplinary hook to hang them on, how would you define your goal for their use?



This might be an interesting and useful place to pause to get some response from you, Florence, and from anyone else following this exchange. Being clear on the purpose of a modeling project is a/the critical first step. That may seem trivially obvious, but it frequently impresses me how quickly folks (myself included!) can get sucked into a technical challenge and loose sight of, or never clearly define, its purpose. Ideally, the sort of curriculum project that will excite us and engage our Educator colleagues will be one where the overall goals are relevant to and significant for a great number of students and teachers. That sort of project is what we at the CLE would be especially excited to identify and begin to support.



I hope that’s helpful and sufficient to keep this conversation going.



John



PS Would the program and ‘flavor’ of the American School in RdJ be familiar to those of us with experience in US public schools?