Educational Issue: Authentic Curriculum

For me my largest take-away from the authentic curriculum presentation was the concept of making authentic curriculum and the standards align.  Previously my concern with authentic curriculum was that it would be so difficult to make something authentic, unique, and individual fit into the actual standards that it was an exercise of futility, though of course I would have never said authentic curriculum was futile, far from it really. The presentation conveyed the idea that as an instructor you can first make your content and curriculum as authentic and individualized as you need to make you students engaged and have the content sink in. From this point you make the standards fit your curriculum rather than let the standards dictate your instruction. A quality instructor should never let the standards create a contortion act out of their instruction, instead they should strive to make an act out of the standards to make their classroom as authentic as possible.

It seems like such a small change in teaching philosophy, but I tend to think it will result into a profoundly powerful paradigm shift in my teaching philosophy, but even beyond this change there was so much more going on with the presentation that was worth mentioning. Authentic curriculum appears to me as a considerably attractive form of instruction largely because of its emphasis on the pragmatic side of instruction where I as the teacher work mostly to build an excellent learning community and take a role as a facilitator of instruction allowing the class to become much more student centered and led.