What are fundamental skills and core concepts in our 21st century world?
The traditional subjects students that are taught the world over--Language, History, Math, Science, and Arts--are holdovers of an earlier time.
Using Common Core English and Math as well as Next Generation Science Standards as the basis, we’re working on developing a map of fundamental concepts and skills in a 21st Century world.
From this analysis, we’ve created IncSchool Fundamentals, a master blueprint for what our innovators will know when they leave our school. IncSchool Fundamentals is a living document, and you can find it here.
Students acquire subject-specific content and promptly forget most of it. We think that when students acquire content because they need it, education will be more purposeful. Thus, our fundamentals are more streamlined than the thousands of standards upon which curriculum maps are based.
Our students need content based on their impact projects. Different students will need different content at different times. One adult lecturing at the front of a classroom cannot deliver the knowledge a variety of students needs. From this need arose Blended Learning.
Blended Learning simply means a mix of face-to-face and online learning. At IncSchool we are continuously experimenting with that mix in order to enable each student to learn what they need at their own pace. iNACOL, the International Association for K12 Online Learning, is the best place to go for the possibilities and practices of Blended Learning.
The world of online curriculum is expanding on a daily basis, and with it, the tools needed to create and manage it. Our entrepreneurial mission, Startup Students, would not be possible without Impact Projects, and Impact Projects would not be possible without Blended Learning. We use a mix of content created by others including major research universities like Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, content created by our teachers and other teachers around the globe, and technical course materials created by professionals such as web designers and coders.
You can find the details of how we organize and launch Blended Learning Toolkits.
My favorite things in life don't cost any money. It's really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.