Cycle 4: How Should Curriculum Be Generated?

Throughout this course, we have taken a look at the reasoning behind what curriculum is, what content should be seen in a curriculum, and whether or not controversial issues should be implemented into a curriculum. This week, our focus is a bit different as we were asked to look at how curriculum should be produced. This is a topic that quite frankly boggles my mind as it is difficult to pinpoint the right or just way of generating a curriculum. It’s especially difficult to brainstorm and create a curriculum that meets the needs of a variety of learning styles, intellectual levels, socioeconomic statuses, age groups, genders, ethnic groups and the list goes on.  Therefore, it can be concluded that in order to generate a genuine and beneficial curriculum, a number of factors need to be in place to ensure authenticity within the curriculum.

In the United States, we have such high hopes for our students. We want our students to become successful citizens as adults. Currently though, our curriculum does not support this idealistic thinking as standardized testing and assessments run our schools. Students lack motivation and rigor because they don’t really see how a test is going to help them in life and I would definitely agree. To put it simply, our current curriculum is failing our youth.

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was an act created not be teachers or people who have worked directly with students, but by politicians who don’t really understand what makes an effective curriculum. They have no idea what it means to teach students and yet they were the ones that created our entire curriculum, telling us teachers what to teach. Along with telling us what to teach, they also told us that this amount of students need to be proficient and/or advanced in math and reading or you will losing school funding or be closed down.. It always frustrates me when people who aren’t teachers try and tell me what I should do, when frankly, they have absolutely no idea. So why is it that people who are not directly working in the school systems are telling us teachers, principals, reading specialists etc. what to do?

In the article “How Christians Were the Founders?” we see a group of devout Christians working as part of the Texas School Board inevitably making decisions of what concepts are addressed and not addressed in their social studies curriculum. I couldn’t help but laugh while reading this article. I find it to be quite ludicrous that people who have no teaching background, but more notably are using their faith as the driving force as to what is taught in a public school system. In all honestly, I first thought that the article was a joke. While yes, our founding fathers were devout Christians, we can see that our current nation has quite a diverse population of races, ethnicities, religions, sexual orientation, genders etc. and therefore, it is quite “outdated” to create a curriculum that does not implement this mentality. Our nation is known as an American melting pot for a reason. Therefore, it is essential that the people who are brainstorming and creating the curriculum are people who have worked directly with students in a class setting, who understand the major components of pedagogy, and who come from a variety of diverse backgrounds to ensure that multiple student subgroups are thought of as the curriculum is being made.

Another major component that needs to be established is determining what the overall objective of this curriculum is going to be. Some questions to ponder when thinking about this are: What are the overall outcomes of this curriculum going to be? What do I want these students to know and be prepared with by the time they graduate? What ways can I motivate these students to want to learn this curriculum? In his article, Ralph Tyler brought up several ideas which address these questions above, looking at several methods to enhance curriculum production. A major idea seen in the article is “learning experiences.” As stated, “The term learning experiences refer to the interaction the learner and the external conditions in the environment to which he can react.” (p. 63) He captured this idea by bringing up the idea of how two students can be in the same classroom, learning the same concept and can have two very different learning experiences from it. He emphasizes that, “The problem, then, of selecting learning experiences is the problem of determining the kinds of experiences likely to produce given educational objectives and also the problem of how to set up situations which will evoke or provide within the students the kinds of learning experiences desired.” To put it simply, we need to make learning engaging and authentic for ALL STUDENTS. Differentiated instruction, while a very difficult philosophy to implement for every student, is and will always be the driving force of what will make a curriculum possible. Our current curriculum does not illuminate this philosophy and this is why so many students leave high school having to take remedial courses in college or who drop out all together. We want America’s youth to be successful so they can help us get out of our current mess.

As stated in my first post, the objective behind the Common Core Curriculum is to make students college and/ or career ready when they graduate from high school. There will be much more rigor in the concepts taught, but there will be less standards to teach each year leaving more time for true mastery of the concepts. Not only that, but these standards are known as anchor standards meaning these are what must be mastered by the end of the students’ senior year. The grade-level standards work as stepping blocks to help ensure that mastery is achieved. Along with this, people who work in the school system were among many represented in the planning process for this new curriculum. Not only that, I am apart of the team at my school helping educate my co-workers about the new curriculum to help make the transition less overwhelming. At the workshops, they asked for educators to give their input on the drafted curriculum to ensure that it’s as ideal as it can be. While I still have some skepticism towards this curriculum, it is quite a step up from our current curriculum and hopefully it will make education less about the data but more about the abilities of those individual students who represent that data.

Generating a curriculum should be seen as a long vigorous process. Firstly, the brains of the operation should not be random people on the street or people who are not experts in the field of education. I don’t go to court pretending to be a lawyer, so people stop acting like being an educator is easy. It’s a profession and a pretty complex one at that. Having educators from a variety of backgrounds should be apart of the planning in order to meet the needs of a multitude of learners. Along these lines, there needs to be clear outcomes for the curriculum and there needs to be a clear correlation between the objectives presented and the individual students who are learning them. Curriculum should not be scripted since every classroom dynamic is different; nonetheless, there should be clear guidelines to the curriculum to allow teachers to accommodate to benefit his/ her students. In conclusion, curriculum needs to be made for the students by the people who know them best.

Problems with Education - Very Funny Video

Additional Resources:

Common Core Standards This website provides further information concerning our new curriculum that will be implemented fall of 2013. 

Importance of Education An interesting article that focuses on where thinking should lie when it comes to what really matters in education.