Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

They need to feel the need.

And then, yes, you have to work hard.

You have to have self-discipline.

You have to have control.

You have to have stick-to-itiveness.

And all those things are things you develop within yourself.

But we're fighting an uphill battle by trying to develop those skills when there actually is no big reason why you should have to do these things that the kids are privy to.

I think teachers can design their curricula in such a way that they invite young people into a new world of thinking in that disciplinary domain.

So in one particular class I saw, which I thought was so skillfully done, this 10th grade history teacher in a school in New York called the class Democracy is an Argument.

And he taught American history from the perspective of the tension that's constantly present between the needs of individuals and the needs of groups.

And they examined all of American history from this tension.

And by looking from this perspective, what that teacher has brilliantly done is inherently set up kids to think about as they learn what happened and when and where and the implications of that, they're set up to look for

A bigger hidden idea, which is what are the tensions behind the values and the beliefs of the various actors and how do they balance themselves?

And how does the tension between those lead to the unfolding of historical events?

It helped the kids to think deeply about the history and also to inevitably see the lessons from history that apply in our current world now.

Yeah, in my own teaching, I mean, at this point in my life, I teach parents, I teach teachers, but I teach classes for graduate students, right?

What I do is I really try to engage people in their own meaning making.

I put up the data, the story.

It's like a journey.

I think of the curriculum as a journey.