Students are more than just readers and writers, and the curriculum needs to reflect this. They are complex problem solvers who, when exposed to real world scenarios, will engage in complex critical thinking and demonstrate social intelligence to arrive at real-world solutions.

In traditional classrooms, students complete isolated assignments as a mere act of compliance. In the New World Classroom, students take on roles like City Planners, Social Media Analysts, EPA Attorneys, Financial Forecasters, Township Mayors, and State Police Investigators who collaborate with peers to tackle projects that mimic problems that modern industry leaders often confront.

In every module, New World Curriculum embraces the constant utilization of technology. We owe it to our students to build their proficiency in a wide range of tech platforms to best prepare them for the challenges of the 21st century. Also, New World Classrooms strive to introduce and expose students to various tech career options throughout their learning experience.

Also, digital notebooks replace pencils and notebooks. Google Classroom, Google Docs, and Google Slides are the communication tools. Google Sites is the 21st century bulletin board. It’s the 21st century.

In the New World Classroom, students spend much of their time working in teams. And not for fleeting ten minute activities where they spend the first five minutes dragging their desks to their assigned group. But more like how colleagues would report to their teams in the workplace. Where there’s real accountability and real intellectual struggle.

After all, in almost any article defining skills needed for the 21st century workplace, collaboration and communication make the top of the list. As ELA teachers with profound responsibilities to teach reading and writing, it’s all too easy to overlook the standards of speaking and listening.

But we can’t.

We encourage classes to heavily embed group work into the modules. Using a standards-based Collaboration Rubric and/or prior experiences, students should create a Group Contract. Not only does this ensure efficient teamwork, but it prepares them for the real-world fraught with contracts from employers, car dealerships, credit card companies, mortgages, and even friends and family members.

That said, modules provide flexible guidelines for teachers, and assessments are varied. Thus, all lessons can be modified for independent or group work; indeed, teachers know what’s best for their classes and their students.

The opening few minutes of class are perhaps the most critical. Like a dynamic hook of a powerful essay, students need to be engaged with a meaningful activity at the opening bell. Setting the instructional tone is important.

The traditional classroom asks students to spend a business minute collecting their writing materials or completing a generic, one-size-fits-all assignment. In a Real World Classroom, this first five minutes is a high-stakes activity that is differentiated into three options: Academic, Scholar, or Challenger. This approach ensures all students can access this important opening activity that prepares them for the rigors of the upcoming class. Learn more about the Differentiated Do Now here.

After all, in almost any article defining skills needed for the 21st century workplace, collaboration and communication make the top of the list. As ELA teachers with profound responsibilities to teach reading and writing, it’s all too easy to overlook the standards of speaking and listening.

But we can’t.

We encourage classes to heavily embed group work into the modules. Using a standards-based Collaboration Rubric and/or prior experiences, students should create a Group Contract. Not only does this ensure efficient teamwork, but it prepares them for the real-world fraught with contracts from employers, car dealerships, credit card companies, mortgages, and even friends and family members.

That said, modules provide flexible guidelines for teachers, and assessments are varied. Thus, all lessons can be modified for independent or group work; indeed, teachers know what’s best for their classes and their students.

All curriculum is easily navigable through Google docs. The Module Map is the hyperlinked calendar, and the Module Teaching Plan is the day-by-day framework.

No more books. No more paper. No more binders of books and paper.

Recognizing every teacher, class, township, and district is different, NWC offers flexibility with curriculum implementation. All activities are designed and explained in every module, ready for teachers to either use immediately or copy, paste, and modify. There are also optional research projects in every module to supplement the learning process.

NWC also recognizes that districts often have instructional mandates and initiatives that make it challenging to rigidly follow any set curriculum. Our modules are designed to be flexible and work around the varying expectations of teachers and schedules of schools across the country.

Books clubs are utilized in all grades throughout the year to support the teaching of reading. They are designed to maximize typical classroom libraries and expose students to a wide range of genres. Examples of such reading modules include mystery, stage & screen, and social action book clubs.

Vehicles used to teach reading standards here are modernized, as well. For example, imagine students creating a character’s Twitter feed throughout the ebbs and flows of an entire book. What would she say? How often would she post? What sorts of emotions would she show? Is she the type to post selfies or pictures of dinner?

School has been the same for generations: teacher assigns work, student does work, teacher grades work. This traditional, student-teacher cyclic bubble ends in the New World Classroom.

Here, modules begin with a Project Launch document. This is often a personalized email, business memo, video, or some other real-world call to action. Students then create a Know/Need to Know Chart that outlines what they understand about the task and what they need to understand to complete it successfully. This Need to Know chart becomes the instructional roadmap for the learning module.

Students then work independently and in groups to create real-world final products that are requested by their boss at Google, colleagues at Goldman Sachs, or potential employer Tesla. Such dynamic end products have outgrown the aging bulletin boards in the corner of the classroom. Instead, they belong on the district’s website, in a community presentation, or on a classroom blog for the entire world to admire.

Rushton Hurley perhaps says it best: “If students are sharing their work with the world, they want it to be good. If they’re just sharing it with you, they want it to be good enough.”

During longer texts, NWC often includes lessons using small-group reciprocal reading. In such a process, a text is broken into three equal parts. During each part, students take one of four tasks: summarizer, predictor, questioner, and connector. After reading the part quietly and taking notes, each student shares out. The summarizer recaps the section in a few sentences, the predictor guesses what might happen next, the questioner asks questions that came up during the reading (with group members possibly answering them), and the connector relates the text to other people, texts, and experiences. Once all four tasks are completed, students alternate tasks and move on to the next reading section.

The focus of New World Curriculum is the wide range of reading and writing standards students need to routinely practice and definitively master by year’s end. However, while the traditional classroom often sticks with just the reading and writing process, New World Classrooms seek to fully develop and prepare students for the real world challenges of college and the modern workplace.

Therefore, all standards are thoughtfully baked into lessons and modules including college and career, speaking and listening, and language standards. Not only do we provide a vertical articulation map of such standards, we also provide sample lessons, strategies, and tips to effectively teach these in your classroom.

In every module, there are also a diverse menu of formative assessments embedded into the curriculum to monitor student progress in reading, writing, language, speaking, listening, and college and career readiness standards.

Also, gone are the days that students are requested to do 20th century activities like write diary or journal entries in notebooks as book characters. Today’s digital natives in the 21st century connect and understand similar activities where they write emails, send text messages, or make social media posts to reflect a deeper understanding of a character. This, in turn, enables them to fully embrace and solve modernized problems and tasks of the 21st century like analyzing an app performance, designing a diet for a professional athlete, and creating a narrative for a video game company.

Although these writing tasks and the writing process are standards-based and mirror NJSLA/CCSS assessments, they are rooted in real-world scenarios. For example, instead of students taking a position on a traditional subject like school uniforms, students engaged in NWC might, instead, after weeks of data collection, write a decisive essay that identifies and explains the guilty party of an EPA water pollution dispute.

Writing instruction is also supplemented by providing grade-specific prewriting and peer revision activities in every writing module.

 

 

New World Curriculum provides comprehensive writing guides for the systemic teaching of narrative, argument, and informational essay writing. These guides supplement the writing modules and provide teachers a common framework and language for the instruction of these writing genres.

Although these writing tasks and the writing process are standards-based and mirror NJSLA/CCSS assessments, they are rooted in real-world scenarios. For example, instead of students taking a position on a traditional subject like school uniforms, students engaged in NWC might, instead, after weeks of data collection, write a decisive essay that identifies and explains the guilty party of an EPA water pollution dispute.

Writing instruction is also supplemented by providing grade-specific prewriting and peer revision activities in every writing module.

New World Curriculum values the diversity of our students, and thus we value the importance of diverse writers and cultures within the curriculum to ensure all students have access points to the instructional modules.

Also, gone are the days that students are requested to do 20th century activities like write diary or journal entries in notebooks as book characters. Today’s digital natives in the 21st century connect and understand similar activities where they write emails, send text messages, or make social media posts to reflect a deeper understanding of a character. This, in turn, enables them to fully embrace and solve modernized problems and tasks of the 21st century like analyzing an app performance, designing a diet for a professional athlete, and creating a narrative for a video game company.

Although these writing tasks and the writing process are standards-based and mirror NJSLA/CCSS assessments, they are rooted in real-world scenarios. For example, instead of students taking a position on a traditional subject like school uniforms, students engaged in NWC might, instead, after weeks of data collection, write a decisive essay that identifies and explains the guilty party of an EPA water pollution dispute.

Writing instruction is also supplemented by providing grade-specific prewriting and peer revision activities in every writing module.

New World Curriculum believes in thoughtful, strategic, and authentic assessments that are carefully sequenced throughout the year. Each grade level has two writing modules, one for the fall and one for the spring, for each of the three writing genres. This allows schools to chart real growth throughout the school year.

In every module, there are also a diverse menu of formative assessments embedded into the curriculum to monitor student progress in reading, writing, language, speaking, listening, and college and career readiness standards.

Also, gone are the days that students are requested to do 20th century activities like write diary or journal entries in notebooks as book characters. Today’s digital natives in the 21st century connect and understand similar activities where they write emails, send text messages, or make social media posts to reflect a deeper understanding of a character. This, in turn, enables them to fully embrace and solve modernized problems and tasks of the 21st century like analyzing an app performance, designing a diet for a professional athlete, and creating a narrative for a video game company.

Although these writing tasks and the writing process are standards-based and mirror NJSLA/CCSS assessments, they are rooted in real-world scenarios. For example, instead of students taking a position on a traditional subject like school uniforms, students engaged in NWC might, instead, after weeks of data collection, write a decisive essay that identifies and explains the guilty party of an EPA water pollution dispute.

Writing instruction is also supplemented by providing grade-specific prewriting and peer revision activities in every writing module.