EDC views curricula as tools to be placed in the hands of skilled teachers, rather than cookbooks to be followed. EDC's curricula integrate professional development for teachers with hands-on, inquiry-based activities for students. Our curricula are designed by and with teachers, in collaboration with academicians and researchers specializing in the relevant content areas. They are extensively field-tested to ensure that they are accessible to a wide range of teachers and students and that they adhere to classroom realities. They are also developed in partnership with EDC and university-based content experts, including mathematicians, research scientists, historians, and artists. In addition to designing curriculum materials in several content areas, EDC advises schools and districts on selecting and implementing curricula that best meets their specific educational needs.
Middle school students participating in EDC afterschool program head outside to explore, study, draw, and photograph various tree species and pond organisms.
New curriculum uses hands-on design activities and books to build children’s science and literacy skills.
CCT is implementing and evaluating an early childhood mathematics curriculum, Big Math for Little Kids, in child care centers throughout New York City. The curriculum is designed to engage children ages four and five in learning key early learning mathematics concepts. CCT provides teachers training in the use of Big Math for Little Kids and is conducting a two-year experiment comparing the curriculum’s impact on early mathematics skills acquisition to that of the traditional curriculum, Creative Curriculum.
EDC is helping the American Cancer Society develop modules for their international university. The university is designed to build the capacity of cancer-control leaders of organizations from communities throughout the world with a nascent or developing civil-society sector. The modules address a range of skill sets that are necessary for cancer control (e.g., fundraising, governance, patient advocacy, media relations).
EDC is developing and testing a middle-grades literacy curriculum that focuses on helping middle school students to develop and apply skills needed for research project. These skills focus on understanding, extracting, and synthesizing information—all key skills needed for carrying out a research project in middle school. The curriculum includes specific teacher-led activities that explicitly teach students these skills and meaningfully takes advantage of key features of the software program, SOLO.
Project Reentry expands and supplements services offered through the Department of Justice Affairs to recently released youth offenders. Services include academic, employability, life, and occupational skills training. EDC provides technical assistance to the project that focuses on program design issues. EDC assesses curriculum provided by partnering institutions, researches and reports on best practices of similar projects, and provides recommendations for program modification based upon surveys of participants and community stakeholders.
At a time when young adolescents need to read complex texts in all content areas, many students continue to have difficulty with the reading process. Yet, although good models of elementary reading instruction are available, middle schools have few models or resources to meet the needs of their growing numbers of struggling readers.
In its second round of funding from The Wallace Foundation, a major priority for this new project is to expand the technical assistance it provides to The Wallace Foundation and its funded network of states and districts as part of its national initiative to transform education leadership in urban school districts.
