A Creative Approach to the Common Core Standards: The Da Vinci Curriculum

A visionary educator and innovator, Harry Chaucer has chosen exactly the right moment in American time to offer this important, potentially revolutionary call to arms in our at-risk educational system.

As anyone who has suffered through what often passes for education in traditional schools will know, education can be a tedious affair, with uncertain results. Harry Chaucer — a brilliant educator — has gone to the roots of human knowledge, digging up unexpected wonders. The Da Vinci curriculum offers an inspired reformation, a genuinely fresh approach, to the process of learning. It takes the student back to the essentials, allowing knowledge to arise naturally from its sources. It’s a hands- on, innovative program that favors intuition and inference over prescription, and it has immense potential to enliven, to re- create, our educational system.

Chaucer suggests the marriage of two very unlikely curriculum aspects, namely the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and a meaningful, biographical context for the standards to evolve. Aimed at middle and secondary educators, the Da Vinci curriculum provides an inductive curriculum that focuses on higher-order thinking skills in math and written and verbal communication highlighting the CCSS. The author suggests this framework but also advocates for a local curriculum that is rooted in a history of ideas. Chaucer does not stop there, however. Chaucer provides a rationale, models, suggestions, and opportunities for educators, through the Da Vinci curriculum, to reexamine their current curriculum practice and elevate the learning of both teachers and students to a natural, authentic, and engaging process. Rather than allowing the CCSS to come and go in their classrooms, educators now have a choice to upgrade their thinking about what meaningful teaching and learning can be in the middle and high school years for their students or simply go through the motions of implementing the CCSS. Summing Up: Recommended.

Harry Chaucer incorporates Dewey’s emphasis on experience into an up- to- date understanding of both interdisciplinary approaches to learning and adolescents’ stages of emotional and cognitive development. While celebrating Leonardo as an example of intellectual and artistic integrity within the Gailer School’s Da Vinci Curriculum, Chaucer’s fundamental concerns as an educator are to encourage authentic engagement and expression in his students, along with responsibility, mutual supportiveness, and creative play in their school- community as a whole. I feel excited by this challenging and hopeful vision of what education can be.

In this book, Harry Chaucer has done for teaching what his Da Vinci Curriculum does for learning. He has found ways to engage students in discovering meaning while they also meet common standards and create personal understanding of their role in a democracy. He invites teachers to do the same, designing learning based on big questions that cross the boundaries of the disciplines in search of defensible answers. Under this principle, teaching and learning follow the pattern of inquiry rather than compliance with prescription.

We’ve always had standards in education and new standards alone won’t transform our system. At best, they will make a better 20th Century system. Chaucer is talking about a needed transformation of the system where learners confidently use what they know against what they do not know, and “question storming” guides the way ahead. This work will bring excitement back to the learner.

Dr. Harry Chaucer has been recognized as a White House Distinguished Teacher; as Teacher of the Year by the National Association of Biology Teachers, as well as by the American Association of University Women; as a Klingenstein Fellow at Columbia University; as an Apple Fellow; and as an NEA Dorros Peace Trophy recipient. He designed the Da Vinci Curriculum, which has been featured by Teacher Magazine, Business People Magazine, Charles Kuralt’s CBS News, and the text Classroom Crusaders. Dr. Chaucer writes not just from theory, but from having successfully designed and led a school that challenges many of the assumptions of conventional American high schools.