In-Service Teachers

Curriculum Workshops

The Discovery Institute’s curriculum writing workshops provide teachers with an opportunity to discuss and develop lesson plans and discovery activities in groups of their peers.

Participating teachers meet on the College campus one afternoon each week through approximately 30 weeks of the school year and part of the summer. They are organized into small groups of six or seven teachers according to the grade levels and subjects they teach. Each group is guided (not directed) by a Discovery Institute facilitator, a teacher who has had experience teaching discovery lessons and activities in his or her own classroom. Within these groups, teachers examine their grade and subject curriculum requirements and decide which areas can be better taught through discovery learning techniques. Individually they write discovery lesson plans and activities and present their plans to the group. The other members of the group make suggestions for improvements in the lesson. The presenter notes the group’s suggestions and revises the lesson. Later in the term the teacher uses the lesson with his or her classes and reports the results to the group. The final revision of the lesson is, consequently, the result of individual and collaborative planning, and practical application.

Teachers find this process rewarding for a number of reasons. First, it gives them the opportunity to develop skills and methods in a collaborative atmosphere that is comfortably supportive. Second, it allows them to listen to the thinking of their peers, some of whom are more experienced than they, and to “see” their own work through another’s perspective. Third, it provides an opportunity for revision before the lesson is actually taught. Fourth, it allows a reconsideration of the effectiveness of the lesson after it has been taught.
 
Throughout the process, Institute personnel provide subject area resources, but they never dictate any internal elements of the lesson plans. The plans are produced exclusively by the teachers who will use them, evincing the Institute’s fundamental procedural axiom that teachers be treated as empowered and capable professionals. As a result, the lessons are filled with the insight and enthusiasm that comes only when individuals are permitted a sense of creation and ownership within their professional communities. The essential value of these lesson plans lies in their exhibition of teacher agency; the Discovery Institute maintains that no institution, no matter its credentials, can impact or inform a teacher’s own classroom instruction better than his or her own intellectual or procedural discoveries while thinking and writing with his or her peers.

Contact: Dr. Allen Ascher & Irwin Goldstein - (718) 982-2325