Chapter 32: Connecting Content to the World

In the Connecting Content to the World activity, teacher candidates working in practicums participate in collaborative planning tasks to improve their capacity to design lessons that connect the curriculum and standards to students’ lives and the real world.

Just learning to create one 60- or 90-minute lesson plan for a classroom of adolescents poses a daunting challenge to most teacher candidates. Teacher education programs provide some structure to help them make sense of the theoretical components underpinning the design of curriculum frameworks and introduce the preparation of courses and units, but the alchemy involved in turning a single standard into a meaningful and purposeful class period for middle or high school students is often lost. This disconnect is troubling, as this is the context in which most candidates find themselves within clinical placements: They are dropped into placements mid-stream and asked to begin lesson planning without any of the conversations about curriculum frameworks and course planning that occur in college classrooms.