Jun 4, 2016

Kardashian Curriculum, Semester 1

Confession #1: One of us is obsessed with the Kardashians. And one of us isn’t. So for those of you who know little about Kim Kardashian, here’s the skinny: Kim is a reality TV star who didn’t let her career be limited by the status quo. After gaining some popularity in the reality TV show Keeping up with the Kardashians, Kim began experimenting with capitalizing on the interests and the needs of her followers. She didn’t wait to be told by producers or groupies what they wanted of her, she put herself out there (45.3 million followers out there!) first in a variety of ways to see how her public responded.

She started with what she knew — shoes — and remixed it to create a new product that people were interested in: Shoe Dazzle. When Shoe Dazzle proved successful, though, she didn’t sit back. Kim began experimenting in other realms to meet the needs of her people, often acting one step ahead of what the times expected.

What’s the connection between Kim Kardashian and curriculum?

Curriculum matters because of its potential impacts on students. Curriculum can completely inspire or deflate the students you teach. Too many teachers create a lesson, place it in sheet protectors in a binder, and expect it to work year after year with every class, never remixing it to meet the needs of the current population. Too many instructional leaders attempt to meet the needs of their students by purchasing a generic curriculum and handing over a script to a struggling teacher, expecting student success. We educators need to be more like Kim. It is necessary to be brave and be willing to experiment when students aren’t successful. We need to anticipate what students want, throw ideas out there, and see what sticks. We should become students of our students, a profound strategy that led to powerful results in Freedom Writers.

Who is in control of the curriculum?

Confession #2: Mid blog post, one of us asked the other, “what’s the difference between curriculum and standards, anyway?” It is easy for teachers to opt out and say they have no control over what they teach or that they have to teach to the test. Curriculum isn’t about the “stuff”, it is about the students and the teachers; standards are the “stuff” we are required to teach. The fact of the matter, however, is that in effective education both teachers and students have significant choice in the learning. Yes, teachers may have to cover certain standards by certain predetermined dates, but the package they use to deliver those standards, the curriculum, can be and must be specialized to the population they teach. Gearing curriculum towards relevant social content and infusing ties to social media better suits the needs of our future graduates.

How can teachers make their curriculum more Kardashian?

Use the tools the kids use.

Instead of blocking social media in school (and why bother when all the dataindicate it is being used by nearly every teen and young adult outside of school), encourage students to use it to share their learning. Even students in primary grades can connect to other classes via Twitter and Instagram to share and reflect on learning. Let’s face it — having to condense thoughts, interpretations, and feelings down to a 140 character tweet is difficult even for someone with a PhD. With appropriate teacher-to-student feedback, forcing the students to reach that level of clarity in their learning by encouraging a twitter discussion can do wonders. Getting students to reflect within the 30 second video limit of Twitter, or better yet, the 9 second video limit of Vine will get them excited about the task (no kid really likes reflecting on an index card as an exit ticket for class) and will spark creativity in your students. Consider these types of interaction a novel type of literacy that is much more relevant to them. Kim didn’t stay in the world of reality TV even though she found success — she moved onto social media because that was the interest of her audience. Don’t stay in the education world of 2010. Move forward with the students.

Use the language kids use.

Just as Kim Kardashian watched the rise of emojis in social media and capitalized on that language with her “Kimojis,” teachers can intentionally capitalize on the language of their kids. Ask former students (& most coworkers) in the past few years about the language used in biology class. They’ll chuckle at the ridiculousness but ultimately they’ll admit that they loved how their teacher referred to her day as being gucci rather than good. In an environment where Twitter was blocked, dry erase markers were used to ‘tweet’ hashtags on the board along with the lessons (#bio4lyfe was a favorite whenever the class discovered something that sparked the kids’ interests). It wasn’t about emulating the kids as much as it was about showing the kids that their teacher heard them.

Give students options. Kim gives her followers options for how to consume her product. Hooked on social media? Use Kimojis. Rather hold a book? Check outSelfish. Into fashion? Shoe Dazzle. It is easier not to give kids options in class. It would have been easy for Kim to sit back and enjoy the success of her first business venture. Doing so, however, can eliminate some of her potential audience. The teacher’s audience is infinitely more important than Kim’s, though. Failure to provide hearty options for learning to our students leaves students out of the learning. Check out Mike Anderson’s book Learning to Choose, Choosing to Learn: The Key to Student Motivation and Achievement (ASCD, 2016) for more insight on the topic of student choice in instruction.

How would Kim relate to your curriculum approach? What are you doing to reach your kids the way Kim Kardashian reaches her audience? So, be more Kardashian and use the tools the kids are using, speak the students’ language, and give them options they would actually use outside the classroom.

Stay tuned for semester 2 of the Kardashian curriculum and learn how going public benefits us and our students.