Cursive meets coding
Curriculum. A ‘fluid evolution’ in the course of studies as schools prepare students for a digital future.
| 16 Aug 2024 | 11:47
Ask your grandparents what primary school was like for them and they may recall strict penmanship lessons and sharp slaps on the wrist if a letter was out of line.
School looks different today. Besides the prohibition of corporal punishment in a majority of states, today’s students graduate high school with skills that didn’t exist when their grandparents — or parents — were in school.
It is the school’s responsibility to equip students with what they need to be “successful global citizens,” said Matthew Kravatz, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction for Monroe-Woodbury School District. In preparation for an increasingly digital world, learning standards have evolved to incorporate the fundamentals of computing, coding, researching and digital literacy into daily learning, oftentimes beginning at the kindergarten level.
The technological divide
Technology in schools isn’t new, but it’s booming. Virtual schooling as a result of the pandemic allowed districts to experiment with new technology. Google Meets and Zoom were essential tools for learning, but they also opened new doors for diverse internet usage in schools.
Many districts distributed school-issued laptops to students to ensure that everyone would be able to attend virtual school during the pandemic. Today, many districts have a school-issued laptop or tablet for every student in the district, from kindergarten through 12th grade.
“The pandemic really accelerated many school districts’ interactions with technology — we were one of those districts,” Daniel Novak, director of education for West Milford Schools, said. “We did not have one-to-one Chromebook implementation prior to the pandemic. Since that time, we’ve embraced it.”
But just because most districts are one-to-one doesn’t mean that the digital divide is obsolete. Rather, it has shifted to a digital access divide, according to Bhargav Vyas, assistant superintendent of compliance and information systems for Monroe-Woodbury School District.
“Having the technology available doesn’t mean having the access,” Vyas said, referring to the ability to access the internet from home. If students can’t access the internet from home, they may not be able to access apps like Google Classroom or Canvas, where they can submit assignments, view their grades and reference textbooks or other relevant materials.
“And the expectation or the standing is we want to make sure that all the students have equal access,” Vyas added. “Not just the technology availability, but equal access.”
Vyas and his team at Monroe Woodbury have uploaded almost all of their internet programs to the Cloud so students can access everything from home. Students “can go home, use their device, and do the same thing they’re doing in front of the teacher at school,” he said.
Cursive and the value of the old ways
Post pandemic, most school districts have the technological ability to go paperless. But they haven’t. In fact, many academic administrators stress the importance of building the pencil-to-paper connection, especially in early education.
“The old ways worked for a lot of years for a lot of different reasons,” said Eric Hassler, assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction for Monroe-Woodbury School District. “I think we would all be foolish to just throw things out completely without recognizing that there’s value to them.”
For this reason, many school districts have opted to continue teaching cursive, despite no explicit requirement for it in the standards. New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania are among the roughly half of states that do not require students to learn cursive, although legislation has been brought up in New Jersey and Pennsylvania to add a cursive requirement in 2022 and 2023 respectively.
“There’s a lot of brain research on the connection between the brain and the stroke of the hand and the writing process,” Novak said. “So, we were never really comfortable with abandoning cursive when it was trendy.”
“Students are going to need to sign documents, sign checks,” added Delaware Valley School District Assistant to the Superintendent for Academic Leadership and Culture Nicole Cosentino. “So it was a skill that, when you look at rewriting curricula, was kept.”
In addition, some students may prefer the use of a pencil and paper to complete assignments because they find value in the tangibility of the physical.
“So there is value to the new way and the newness, but I think you always need to remember where you came from, and almost pay homage to what it took to get there,” Kravatz said. “And sometimes that might be something as simple as cursive writing or understanding what the hands on a clock mean.”
In with the new
The National Educational Technology Plan is the genesis of the new digital standards that will shape the future of technology in schools. Last updated in 2016, this year the United States Department of Education released the 2024 version: A Call to Action for Closing the Digital Access, Design and Use Divides.
Focused on digital equality for all students, the plan “offers examples of schools, districts, classrooms, and states doing the complex work of establishing systemic solutions to inequities of access, design, and use of technology in support of learning,” according to the United States Department of Education. “We have a very robust educational technology committee that consists of teachers from every school, every subject,” Novak said. The committee’s task is to interpret and implement technological standards to “prepare kids for the digital society.”
The best of both worlds
Many administrators resented the idea of a paperless district in 2024, while acknowledging that technology is an integral component of a comprehensive education today.
Digitalization and tradition are not mutually exclusive. They can, and do, exist at the same time in education, working in conjunction to build a well-rounded student and provide support for every learner. “There’s tools out there that take the written form and can turn it into a digital platform,” Novak said, “and I think that is where these two worlds come together. And I think that as you look for the future, that has to have a place.”
The Department of Education leans into this duality, rarely removing skills from learning standards. As skills become increasingly relevant, they are added to the standards in addition to previous foundational skills.
“It’s not just like a finite list where we’re adding two, so we have to find two others to take out,” Hassler said. “I see it more as like a fluid sort of evolution.”
As the field of education continues to evolve, students will learn skills each year that contribute to their success.
“I am envious every single day of the education that my kids get,” Hassler said. “The education that my kids get is amazing and that is my number one takeaway every single day.”
What are learning standards?
Created by the United States Department of Education, learning standards serve as a roadmap for a child’s complete education. They detail the skills a student should have at the end of each grade, the content required to build those skills and how the skills will ultimately build a well-rounded student.
National standards are reviewed by states’ department of education and tweaked to best suit the state. “They’re usually taking a larger body and molding it into something specific for New York State,” Matthew Kravatz, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction for Monroe-Woodbury School District, said. These standards are living documents, the curricula regularly updated as the societal value of certain skills evolves.
Perhaps the most controversial set of learning standards came into practice in 2010. The Common Core standards were initially popular and quickly adopted by most states. By the mid-2010s, they were widely criticized as overcomplicated, insufficient and overly reliant on standardized testing.
Since then, the standards have been altered and reintroduced. New York State curricula are based on the Next Generation Standards, which went into effect at the beginning of the 2022-2023 school year.
The New Jersey Student Learning Standards are updated every five years, most recently in 2020. New mathematics and English Language Arts standards will be implemented for the 2024/2025 school year.
West Milford Schools were ahead of the new standards, beginning their mathematics curriculum reselection process in 2019, a process that was interrupted by the pandemic.
“Our goals for evaluating and changing our curriculum changed because of the dynamic of the world,” said Daniel Novak, director of education for West Milford Schools.
Pennsylvania’s Integrated Standards for Science, Environment, Ecology, Technology and Engineering for grades K-5 were updated in 2022 for the first time in 20 years. The new standards will take effect at the beginning of the 2024-2025 school year, emphasizing a move away from the traditional memorization of facts for success on exams. They push students toward hands-on learning through experiments and content-based exploration.
“Future-ready” Pennsylvania Core Standards for English Language Arts and Mathematics took effect on March 1.
“So there is value to the new way and the newness, but I think you always need to remember where you came from, and almost pay homage to what it took to get there. And sometimes that might be something as simple as cursive writing or understanding what the hands on a clock mean.”
- Matthew Kravatz, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction for Monroe-Woodbury School District
“There’s a lot of brain research on the connection between the brain and the stroke of the hand and the writing process. So, we were never really comfortable with abandoning cursive when it was trendy.”
- Daniel Novak, director of education for West Milford Schools
“Students are going to need to sign documents, sign checks. So it (cursive) was a skill that, when you look at rewriting curricula, was kept.”
- Nicole Cosentino, Delaware Valley School District Assistant to the Superintendent for Academic Leadership and Culture