Changing Curriculum and a School's Structure: Commentary on ATLAS

Abstract

The ATLAS design marries curriculum initiatives of the Coalition for Essential Schools, Education Development Center, and Teaching for Understanding with structural supports shown to improve and change a school's social structure from the School Development Program. In the four articles, we see that curriculum and the school's social structure are joined at the hip of the ATLAS design. Changing a school's social structure is prerequisite to and connected with the curricular changes suggested and described in the four articles. Discussions of curriculum are discussions about social structure; discussions about social structure are discussions of curriculum. The ATLAS design allows us to examine both domains through a single lens. The four articles wrestle with the impact of the school's social structure on teachers' thinking and curriculum implementation, and vice versa. For example, McDonald argues that curriculum is a device for allocating resources to teaching and learning-especially time, space, attention, materials, and teaching expertise-a change in the school's social structure. He poses various modes of understanding such as domain projects, long-term interdisciplinary projects, problems, Socratic seminars and