Best Practices & Most effective strategies for Curriculum Design in K-12 education in America Essay

course of take aim is a conception for breeding that includes targeting a student population, conducting a needs assessment, and writing a mission recital. It includes developing goals, objectives, theme, t apieceing strategies, and assessment tools. Alignment is critical in plan schooling from purpose and philosophy, to goals and objectives, to content and activities, and to assessment and evaluation. Working through and through a put to tempt of leading and answering who, what, where, wherefore, when, how questions is essential in linguistic persist and developing syllabus. A syllabus serves several purposes that include Explicit statements of political orientation underlying the instruction (why atomic number 18 you teaching it, and why is the teaching the sort it is? General long-term aims (what argon students intended to gain from following the forge form? Specific, proveable, short-term objectives (what ordain they be able to do as a result of followi ng the course? ) Resources to be engagementd (what is needed to give birth the course? ) The delivery methods to be employed (how is it to be taught? ) Timing of the units and their sequencing (when is it to be taught and in what order? ) Assessment procedures and the balance of assessments to be make (how, when and why impart it be examined?) A methodology for evaluating how well the course has been authentic (how forget instructor acquire feedback from the students ab break the course? ). K-12 precept is delineate as breedingal technology in United States, Canada and opposite countries for public altogether in solelyy supported gradations prior to college. The K stands for kindergarten and 12 de nones 1st to 12th grade before the 13th that is the first year of college. Curricular Theory and Theorists The word course of study has its origins in the running/chariot tracks of Greece. It was, literally, a course. In Latin platform was a racing chariot currere was t o run.A physical exerciseful starting line point for us here might be the definition offered by John Kerr and taken up by Vic Kelly in his standard die on the accede. Kerr defines class as, All the learning which is planned and guided by the school, whether it is carried on in groups or individually, inside or give a styleside the school. 1 This gives us slightly home to move on. For the moment all we need to do is highlight two of the key features Learning is planned and guided. We drive to mean in advance what we atomic number 18 looking to carry through and how we are to go or so it. The definition refers to school day.We should recognize that our current appreciation of class possibility and perpetrate emerged in the school and in relation to other schoolhouse ideas much(prenominal) as subject and lesson. In what follows we are going to demeanor at four trends of approaching curriculum opening and do broadcast as a body of friendship to be transmitted . course of study as an attempt to achieve certain ends in students product. Curriculum as appendage. Curriculum as invest session. Curriculum as a body of knowledge to be transmitted M whatever concourse still equate a curriculum with a syllabus. Syllabus, naturally, originates from the Greek.Basically it means a concise statement or table of the heads of a discourse, the contents of a treatise, the subjects of a serial publication of lectures. In the form that many of us will cause been old(prenominal) with it is connected with courses targeting to examinations. For example, when teachers talk of the syllabus associated with, say, the Cambridge GSCE exam. What we tin see in much(prenominal) documents is a series of headings with some additional nones which rophy reveal the areas that may be examined. A syllabus will not much than lots than not indicate the relative importance of its topics or the order in which they are to be studied.Those who compile a syllab us tend to follow the handed-down textbook approach of an order of contents, or a pattern prescribed by a logical approach to the subject, or the class of a university course in which they may befuddle participated. Thus, an approach to curriculum possible go through and practice which focussinges on syllabus is only really touch with content. Curriculum is a body of knowledge-content and/or subjects. Education in this guts is the process by which these are transmitted or delivered to students by the near effective methods that can be devised 3.Where peck still equate curriculum with a syllabus they are likely to limit their planning to a consideration of the content or the body of knowledge that they wish to transmit. It is excessively because this view of curriculum has been adopted that many teachers in primary schools, have regarded issues of curriculum as of no concern to them, since they have not regarded their delegate as being to transmit bodies of knowledge in t his manner. Curriculum as product The dominant modes of describing and managing education are today couched in the productive form.Education is most often seen as a technological exercise. Objectives are set, a plan drawn up, and then applied, and the resultant roles (products) measured. In the new-made 1980s and the 1990s many of the debates about the National Curriculum for schools did not so much concern how the curriculum was thought about as to what its objectives and content might be. It is the work of two American writers Franklin Bobbitt, 1928 and Ralph W. Tyler, 1949 that dominate possible action and practice at heart this tradition. In The Curriculum Bobbitt writes as follows The central hypothesis is simple.Human tone, however varied, consists in the performance of specific activities. Education that prepares for life is one that prepares definitely and adequately for these specific activities. However numerous and versatile they may be for any social class they c an be perk uped. This requires only that one go out into the world of affairs and disc everywhere the particulars of which their affairs consist. These will show the abilities, attitudes, habits, appreciations and forms of knowledge that men need. These will be the objectives of the curriculum. They will be numerous, definite and particularized.The curriculum will then be that series of have intercourses which children and youth must have by way of obtaining those objectives. This way of thinking about curriculum theory and practice was heavily inclined by the development of management thinking and practice. The rise of scientific management is often associated with the name of its main advocate F. W. Taylor. Basically what he proposed was greater surgical incision of labor with jobs being simplified an extension of managerial control over all elements of the workplace and cost accounting based on opinionated cadence-and-motion study.All three elements were involved in this co nception of curriculum theory and practice. For example, one of the attractions of this approach to curriculum theory was that it involved detailed oversight to what concourse needed to know in order to work, live their lives and so on. A familiar, and more restricted, example of this approach can be entrap in many training programs, where particular tasks or jobs have been analyse and broken down into their component elements and lists of competencies drawn up. In other words, the curriculum was not to be the result of armchair speculation except the product of organized study.Bobbitts work and theory met with mixed responses. As it stands it is a adept exercise. However, it wasnt criticisms such as this which initially limited the impact of such curriculum theory in the latterly 1920s and 1930s. Rather, the growing influence of progressive, child-centred approaches shifted the ground to more romantic notions of education. Bobbitts long lists of objectives and his stress o n order and structure hardly sat comfortably with such forms. The Progressive movement lost much of its momentum in the late 1940s in the United States and from that period the work of Ralph W.Tyler, in particular, has made a lasting impression on curriculum theory and practice. He shared Bobbitts emphasis on rationality and relative simmpleness. His theory was based on four fundamental questions 1. What educational purposes should the school seek to carry out? 2. What educational get laid can be reard that is likely to attain these purposes? 3. How can these educational experiences be effectively organized? 4. How can we deposit whether these purposes are being attained? Like Bobbitt he also place an emphasis on the formulation of behavioural objectives.Since the real purpose of education is not to have the instructor perform certain activities scarce to confer about significant changes in the students pattern of behaviour, it becomes beta to recognize that any statements of objectives of the school should be a statement of changes to take place in the students. We can see how these concerns translate into an ordered procedure and is very like to the technical or productive thinking steps set out below. 1. Diagnosis of need 2. Formulation of objectives 3. Selection of content 4. Organization of content 5. Selection of learning experiences 6. Organization of learning experiencesThere are a number of issues with this approach to curriculum theory and practice. The first is that the plan or programme assumes great importance. For example, we might look at a more recent definition of curriculum as A program of activities by teachers designed so that pupils will attain so far as possible certain educational and other schooling ends or objectives 4. The enigma here is that such programmes inevitably exist prior to and outside the learning experiences. This takes much away from apprentices. They can end up with little or no voice. They are told what they must learn and how they will do it.The victor or failure of both the program and the individual learners is judged on the basis of whether pre-specified changes occur in the behaviour and person of the learner. If the plan is tightly adhered to, thither can only be limited opportunity for educators to make use of the interactions that occur. It also can deskill educators in another way. For example, a number of curriculum programs, particularly in the USA, have attempted to make the student experience teacher proof. The logic of this approach is for the curriculum to be designed outside of the schoolroom or school.Educators then apply programs and are judged by the products of their actions. It turns educators into technicians. Second, in that respect are questions around the nature of objectives. This forge is hot on measurability. It implies that behaviour can be objectively, mechanistically measured. There are unequivocal dangers here there always has to be some uncertaint y about what is being measured. We only have to reflect on questions of success in our work. It is often very difficult to judge what the impact of particular experiences has been. sometimes it is years after the event that we come to appreciate something of what has happened.For example, most cozy educators who have been around a few years will have had the experience of an ex-participant telling them in great detail about how some forgotten event brought about some fundamental change. Yet there is something more. In order to measure, things have to be broken down into little and smaller units. The result, as many of you will have experienced, can be long lists of often trivial skills or competencies. This can lead to a focus in this approach to curriculum theory and practice on the parts rather than the whole on the trivial, rather than the significant.It can lead to an approach to education and assessment which resembles a shopping list. When all the items are ticked, the person has passed the course or has learnt something. The percentage of overall judgment is someways sidelined. leash, there is a real problem when we come to examine what educators actually do in the classroom, for example. Much of the look for concerning teacher thinking and classroom interaction, and curriculum innovation has pointed to the lack of impact on actual pedagogic practice of objectives. One way of viewing this is that teachers simply get it impose on _or_ oppress as they do not work with objectives.The difficulties that educators experience with objectives in the classroom may point to something inherently wrong with the approach, that it is not grounded in the study of educational exchanges. It is a place of curriculum theory and practice mostly imported from technological and industrial settings. Fourth, there is the problem of unanticipated results. The focus on pre-specified goals may lead both educators and learners to overlook learning that is occurring as a r esult of their interactions, but which is not listed as an objective.The apparent simplicity and rationality of this approach to curriculum theory and practice, and the way in which it mimics industrial management have been powerful factors in its success. A further accumulation has been the ability of academics to use the present to attack teachers. There is a tendency, recurrent enough to suggest that it may be endemic in the approach, for academics in education to use the objectives model as a stick with which to raise up teachers. What are your objectives? is more often asked in a tone of contend than one of interested and helpful inquiry.The demand for objectives is a demand for plea rather than a description of ends. It is not about curriculum design, but rather an expression of irritation in the problems of accountability in education. 5 Curriculum as process We have seen that the curriculum as product model is heavily dependent on the setting of behavioural objectives . The curriculum, essentially, is a set of documents for implementation. Another way of looking at curriculum theory and practice is via process. In this sense curriculum is not a physical thing, but rather the interaction of teachers, students and knowledge.In other words, curriculum is what actually happens in the classroom and what bulk do to prepare and evaluate. What we have in this model is a number of elements in constant interaction. It is an active process and link up with the practical form of reasoning set out by Aristotle, which is as follows Teachers enter particular schooling and situations with an ability to think critically in action and with an understanding of their role and the expectations others have of them, and a proposal for action which sets out essential principles and features of the educational encounter.Guided by these, they encourage conversations between, and with, people in the situation out of which may become thinking and action. They continually evaluate the process and what they can see of outcomes. Curriculum as praxis Curriculum as praxis is, in many respects, a development of the process model. While the process model is driven by full frequent principles and places an emphasis on judgment and meaning making, it does not make definite statements about the interests it serves. It may, for example, be used in such a way that does not make continual reference to collective human beings welfare and to the emancipation of the human spirit.The praxis model of curriculum theory and practice brings these to the centre of the process and makes an explicit allegiance to emancipation. Thus action is not simply informed, it is also committed. It is praxis. Critical pedagogy goes beyond situating the learning experience within the experience of the learner it is a process which takes the experiences of both the learner and the teacher and, through dialogue and negotiation, recognizes them both as problematic. It allows, indeed encourages, students and teachers unneurotic to confront the real problems of their existence and relationships.When students confront the real problems of their existence they will soon also be faced with their own oppression. The process model is modified to fit the praxis model, which is as follows Teachers enter particular schooling and situations with a personal, but shared idea of the good and a commitment to human emancipation, an ability to think critically in action, an understanding of their role and the expectations others have of them, and a proposal for action which sets out essential principles and features of the educational encounter.Guided by these, they encourage conversations between, and with, people in the situation out of which may become informed and committed action. They continually evaluate the process and what they can see of outcomes. Proposed Curriculum Design A curriculum nimble for the targeted students of K-12 education must be tailored to meet the ir needs for a fast and productive mental growth.Therefore a curriculum for k-12 education must be prepared so that it supports all children and young people from 3 18 to develop as successful learners, confident individuals, trusty citizens and effective contributors, ready to play a full part in society now and in the future. As part of the review process we need to develop clear guidance which sets out expectations of what children and young people should learn and also promotes flexibility and space so that teachers can use their professional judgment creatively to meet childrens needs.Therefore, before commencement ceremony to design a curriculum for k-12 education, one must capture the plaza of what young people will learn over the course of their schooling and express this through the experience and outcome statements. Curriculum Designing Guidelines place The construction of experiences and outcomes that effectively provide progression in each curriculum area and convey the values, principles and purposes of A Curriculum for Excellence is central to the success of the program.In particular, it is important that you reflect relevant aspects of the four capacities in your work. If we can get this right these outcomes and experiences will have a significant, positive, impact on classroom practice and hence on the learning experience of all children and young people. It is an exciting prospect. Starting point In phase 1 each early review group should be asked to simplify and prioritize the curriculum (from age 3 to 15 in the first instance) retaining what soon works well and making changes where these were justified by research evidence.The create from phase 1 of the review process and the rationale for your curriculum area, research and other national and international comparators are your starting points. Your work will be based on the relevant parts of the Curriculum Frameworks for Children 3 5, 5 14 guidelines, Standard Grade, and National Qu alifications. It is important that experience and outcome statements you write at each Curriculum for Excellence level provide appropriate cognitive demand. The framework for outcomes The experiences and outcomes will sit within a framework of advice to teachers.Curriculum Area The eight curriculum areas are expressive Arts, Health and Wellbeing, Languages, Maths, Religious and Moral Education, Science, Social Studies and Technologies. Rationale The rationale provides an overview of the curriculum area states its main purposes and imbibes its contribution to the values and purposes. Subsets of the curriculum area individually curriculum area is subdivided either into fields of learning or subjects (e. g. expressive Arts into art, drama, dance and music) or into aspects of learning in that area (e.g. Languages into auditory modality and talking, reading and writing) Lines of development These identify learning tracks in each subset of the curriculum area. They are expressed in di fferent ways in each area of the curriculum. For example within expressive arts they identify the skills to be developed creating, presenting and evaluating in art, drama, dance and music within science they describe broad areas of knowledge and understanding to be developed biodiversity, being human and cells in Our Living World.Experiences and outcomes Within each line of development, experiences and outcomes describe the anticipate progression in learning for children and young people. Essential outcomes Essential outcomes are a small number of high level statements, derived from the main purposes describe in the rationale, that encapsulate what learning in that curriculum area provides for all children and young people. Taken together, the essential outcomes are intended to sum up the expectations for the broad general education of all young people.The focus of your work will be writing the experiences and outcomes for your curriculum area. It is likely that there will be inter play between what you nurture and the essential outcomes , which are the ones helping to go and refine the other in an iterative manner. Outcomes should be written in the clearest possible English. Where possible these should be accessible to children and young people, but not at the expense of clarity. It is also important to try to write sparkly and engaging experiences and outcomes. Best Practices of Writing the CurriculumUltimately the intention is to spring up streamlined guidance for the entire curriculum in a hit document. We also intend to make the outcomes available in electronic coif to allow curriculum leaders and teachers to identify and blend outcomes from both within and beyond curriculum areas. Several floors will be required to achieve this. Curriculum for Excellence Achievement framework In the first stage of work the aim is to produce experience and outcome statements up to troika level with provisional work done to Fourth level. Both Third and Fourth level have particular significance.Third level is important because it defines the point at which a young person has experienced a broad general education and has satisfied the essential outcomes in all curriculum areas. At this point there may be opportunities to have what she or he wishes to study, typically with a greater degree of specialty and in greater depth to Fourth level and possibly beyond. For some pupils, their choices will result in continued, lateral progression, in curriculum areas at Third level. Fourth level is important because it will enable passageway into the formal qualifications system.Experiences and outcomes at this level will tend to be more specific than those for earlier levels. The outcomes and experiences written during this stage will be subject to refinement through the engagement process. Writing an excellent outcome invariably remember that the experiences and outcomes should have an impact on classroom practice and learning. The outcomes should not be written in the form of assessment criteria, nor should they constrain learning. any outcome should therefore be tested against the following criteria 1.It should express learning that is clear to the teacher, and where possible the young person. This will promote the application of shaping assessment strategies. 2. It should indicate the purpose of the outcome and/or direct the filling of learning activities for all children and young people. 3. It should allow evaluation of the outcome. In other words, it should be clear from the outcome what evidence might be observe to demonstrate progress by the child or young person. likewise bear in mind that there is no intention to produce an elaborated curriculum.Outcomes should therefore offer and support opportunities for enrichment and development for those young people with additional support needs who may not progress beyond the first levels. As you complete blocks of work a further test is to consider the extent to which you h ave prioritised and simplified existing guidance and to ask yourself if any changes are robust and justifiable. As a general precept outcomes should begin with the I can stem. Experiences describe purposeful and worthwhile tasks, activities or events that contribute to motivation, personal development and learning.As a general rule they should be signalled using the I have stem. The following additional general parameters will help you get started. Simplification and prioritisation should result in time and space being made to operate the seven principles of curriculum design. For example, teachers should have time for greater depth of study, to introduce topics or ideas in a relevant context or to respond to local events or mass and to ensure progression. Assume your outcomes can be taught within the time allocations typically applied in schools at present.