Life Skills Curriculum: To Be or Not to Be?

For the past 3 years there has been a concerted effort to increase the quality of Life Skill courses, teaching, and program uniformity across the district.  We have made great progress in all of these areas.  Great things are happening.  In February, we met and began generating a list of resources we often use in our rooms and this was a good start to naming for ourselves and others just what we do from day to day.

At the end of the day, what matters to our students is not that they all learned from the same textbook, but that what they get from us is of a very high quality.  As a citywide program, we know our population better than anyone and we’ve been very clear about what we believe they need the most from us, in terms of content.  So the next biggest question is simple:  From where cometh that content?  

I personally believe that we are as capable than any publishing company of generating high quality assignments for the transition courses.  If we teach skills that are needed for everyday life, then the content most often lies right before our eyes in our own homes in the forms of bills, labels, financial documents, calendars, instructions, and so on.  It might take a few minutes to create a meaningful worksheet using such things from our homes, but that at least allows us to adapt material for our audience.  And up to now, I have never found a published curriculum that covers such areas in enough depth or that provides enough practice.  To be sure, there are some ‘okay’ things out there, but nothing that could cover the amount of time our courses are taught.

This is where we have our challenge.  To provide sufficient (and hopefully more uniform) material of a high quality for our students.  I have had great hope that many of you would offer such homemade assignments to each other at this website, but frankly, “it ain’t hapnin” right now.  But in the days ahead, we have an opportunity to show that we can, will, and do provide such high quality assignments to our students.  It will not likely be the case that we will all be able to do whatever we want to do in our own classrooms.

Would you consider making a backup of the documents you’ve created for your courses on a disc and make those available this summer, perhaps even on this website?  If you are, I would be more than happy to work on uploading such things here on lifeskillsmpls.

And, from now on, you’ll receive automatic emails alerting you to the fact that a new post has been created.

Jim Barnhill, South High

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