Curriculum Overview
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Page Contents
Curriculum
Curriculum & Instruction
Bases for Curriculum Planning
Curricula Criteria
How Values Influence Planning
Curriculum Foundation
Other Pages of Interest
Sources

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Curriculum
The term curriculum is used in a number of different ways by parents, educators, and businesses. Some see curriculum as the "academic stuff that is done to children in school." Others view it as teacher directions and student activities that can be purchased from any number of curriculum publishers. Teachers themselves use the term in different ways depending on their views and needs. In any school staff room one may hear statements about curriculum such as the following:
"There's not enough time in the day to get through the curriculum!"
"The ____ reading curriculum's great but I hate that ____ math curriculum."
"I found this great curriculum website the other day that has all kinds of ideas for science lessons!"
"The kids are really making progress since I began modifying the curriculum to better meet their needs."
Webster's concisely defines curriculum as, "A course of study offered by a school" (Webster's II New Riverside Dictionary, 1984 p176). Curriculum is also often referred to as learning content, activities, and structures as experienced by students. Ronald C. Doll, in his book, Curriculum Improvement: Decision Making and Process, goes further, stating that:
The curriculum of a school is the formal and informal content and process by which learners gain knowledge and understanding, develop skills, and alter attitudes, appreciations, and values under he auspices of that school (Doll, 1996 p15).
It is this last definition that is perhaps the most useful to educators who wish to affect and improve student learning. Partially this is because it lacks the vagueness that many definitions have, and partially it is because curriculum, as Doll has defined it, can have outcomes that may be measured, allowing for the curriculum to be acted upon and improved.
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The Relationship Between Curriculum and Instruction
Instruction is the creation and implementation of purposefully developed plans for the teaching of curriculum content. It is what teachers often concisely refer to as "planning" and "teaching." The relationship between curriculum and instruction is so intimate that "curriculumandinstruction" is frequently spoken as if it were one word (perhaps we should refer to it as "curstruction" or "instriculum"). With curriculum being the content of what is taught along with an overall process of how that content is to be taught, and instruction being the more detailed plans and the way those plans are implemented in order to teach the curriculum content, it becomes easy to understand that the two must be compatible in order to maximize student learning.
The case of multiage classrooms illustrates this close tie that exists between curriculum and instruction. Currently the most common classroom structure in American elementary schools is the single-grade classroom. This structure is meant to make instruction more efficient, allowing students of the same age to move through curriculum content at the same pace. In these classrooms the most prevalent teaching method is whole-class direct instruction. Because of the dominance of this structure nation-wide, commercially available curriculum and state learning standards are designed to be implemented in this type of learning environment. Some educators in their efforts to improve education have switched from a single-grade classroom structure to a multiage one. The multiage structure purposefully places students of different ages together in the same classroom while supporting an individualized continuous progress instructional model. While changing the structure of the classroom, multiage educators also change the instructional methods they use in order to better match the needs of their diverse group of students. They have found that "(c)urriculum designed for use in single-grade classrooms is not always adaptable to environments in which whole-class direct instruction is not the norm. Allowing for flexible groupings, academic diversity, and individual pacing are needs that are central to multiage practices" (Yates, Curriculum in Multiage Learning Environments, 2000). The instructional methods used by these teachers necessitate that curriculum be organized in a compatible manner.
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The Bases for Curriculum Planning
When planning for curriculum improvement, two categories of bases should be understood, those that are institutional in nature and those that affect people directly. The institutional bases for curriculum planning include planning domains, the context or characteristics of the school situation, the impact of current trends and issues, and the use of strategic planning. Those bases of curriculum planning that affect people directly include student and teacher needs, local curriculum problems to be addressed, competencies of the planners, and pressures from inside and outside the school (Doll, 1996 p362-378). All of these bases affect the curriculum planning process in various ways and to differing degrees. They can also vary with each situation over time.
As of this writing, a current educational issue in the United States is that of student performance and preparation for the workplace. The trend is for state governments to create standards of competence that are tested at various points in students' educational careers and to make schools and students accountable for their performance on these tests. Test scores are frequently reported in the local media and this may lead to pressure from the local population being brought to bear on the school to improve its curricula. The context of the school may be that it is within a district that hasn't passed a school levy for a number of years and thus has not been able to budget money to work on improving the curricula during that time. This not-uncommon scenario shows how a combination of factors can become the bases for, and can influence the curriculum planning process.
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Criteria to Plan, Develop, and Implement Curricula
Ronald Doll lists eleven principles of decision making and process as it relates to the evaluation of curricula and projects. These principles form the criteria of a quality curriculum development process that includes the stages of planning, development, and implementation.
Curriculum decisions should be made:
1. for valid educational reasons.
2. on the basis of the best available evidence.
3. in a context of broadly conceived aims of education
4. within a context of previously made decisions and of needs for additional decision making so that balance and other important curriculum considerations may be safeguarded.
5. by achieving a resolution of forces originating in the nature and development of learners, the nature of learning processes, demands of the society at large, requirements of the local community, and the nature and structure of subject matter to be learned.
6. cooperatively by persons who are legitimately involved in the effects of the decisions.
7. taking into account new facts of human life such as the proliferation of knowledge and a need for a new sense of unity within our diversity.
8. taking into account the many differences among learners.
9. with a realistic view of certain organizational or engineering matters that can affect the quality of the decisions themselves.
10. with some forethought about ways in which they may be communicated and shared.
11. only with reference to subject matter and pupil experiences that cannot be offered as satisfactorily outside the school (Doll, 1996 p293-296).
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How Values Can Influence Curriculum Planning
Social forces that can influence curriculum planning come from far and wide. The ideas and values of various groups of people may include their social goals, ideas about cultural uniformity and diversity, social pressures, ideas about social change, their plans for the future, and their concepts of culture (Coutts, 1999). An example of this can be seen when contrasting the CYFERNet and the Catalyst: Voices of Chicago School Reform websites. The Children, Youth, and Families Education and Research Network website, CYFERNet is designed to provide "...program, evaluation and technology assistance for children, youth and family community-based programs". The website is a collaborative project that "...is funded (by) the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service and the Cooperative Extension System" (Cooperative Extension System, 2000). Because of this, many of the curriculum links are to agricultural and 4-H educational activities. In contrast, the CATALYST: Voices of Chicago School Reform website sponsored by the Community Renewal Society, works "...to create racially and economically just communities" (Community Renewal Society, 2000). Its focus is on Chicago area urban educational issues, especially in regards to race and the economically disadvantaged. It provides information to help influence educational decision making as it relates to the organization's mission. On the one hand is a group that wishes to influence educational policy (and thus curriculum) to better meet the needs of children in an urban environment, and on the other a group trying to do the same for rural children. Although there may be a few communities where the two groups compete with one another, they do illustrate how the values and issues of various social groups can try to influence curriculum planning.
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Curriculum Foundation
At the foundation to every curriculum, including the planning, design, and implementation stages, is the educational philosophy of those directly involved in the process. Often this can influence to a great extent the direction a school or school district takes with its curriculum and instruction. At the school district this writer has been employed with, the philosophy has allowed for a diversity of instructional styles as a way of meeting a diversity of children's learning styles. This has led in the elementary school to several educational options available for students and parents: single-grade, single-grade clusters, multiage, looping, and home-school hybrid educational environments. Because some of these educational structures have different instructional designs than others, there are available different curricular materials. Other nearby schools offer only a single choice and a single curriculum. The basis for these decisions can be found in the above mentioned factors as well as in the educational philosophies of the decision makers.
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Other Pages of Interest
• To read about the educational philosophy of the writer, please follow this link to My Teaching Philosophy.
• To read a paper written by this author that discusses in more detail how the philosophical views of curriculum committee members can influence a curriculum decision, follow this link to Position Paper on Curriculum Priorities.
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Sources:
All sources used in creating this website are cited on the Bibliography and Sources webpage. Also note that in-text citations used above are linked directly to the appropriate portion of the Bibliography and Sources webpage.
My Teaching Philosophy
Russell Yates
I am currently the teacher of children age 8 to 11 years old in an elementary multiage learning environment. Two principles are at the heart of all that I do as a teacher. First, I believe that education should be student-centered and second, that fostering an enjoyment of learning is probably the most important thing we can do with our students.
Learning and not teaching is the focus in my classroom. This simple statement is filled with implications. If teaching is the focus of a classroom, then control over student academic, social, and behavioral actions becomes the job of the teacher. Management of the details of individual students, of the classroom, of academic progress and pace, and even of recess behavior become the primary concern. An information delivery model in which knowledge is passed from the textbook company or state department of education through the teacher to the student would be the major route for knowledge acquisition in a teacher-centered classroom. This type of classroom supports a "culture of silence" as Paulo Freire has observed, a programming of conformity if looked at on a societal scale. It is also, as I see it, a Behaviorist way of managing instruction in which management of learning is reliant on forces external to the child, including reinforcement and an emphasis on consequences administered by the teacher.
In contrast, a learning focused classroom, as I see it, puts the primary emphasis on the process of learning and the use of knowledge. The teacher's job is then one of helping students acquire learning skills and the practicing of those skills in ways that are useful and meaningful to the student. The teacher does not act as some sort of all-important filter of information determining all of what each student needs to know, but rather becomes more of a guide, setting up learning and practice situations and showing or modeling new ways of acquiring and using information. For instance, I use many ideas from Gestalt Psychology when helping my students in math. My instruction is based on a problem-solving model in which I guide my students to find a variety of solutions to various problems, then set up experiences for them to transfer their new skills to similar but different situations. I also use Vygotsky's concepts of the zone of proximal development, scaffolding, and social interaction in my classroom. By using peer tutoring and modeling thoughtfully along with my own support of the individual student, children frequently show tremendous cognitive growth. Thus I believe that the learning environment is not limited to the classroom and to what I can always control but rather is made up of the tools of learning, including social interaction.
In looking at how I came to believe such a classroom is most conducive to student learning, it is important to first visit some of my past classrooms.
In the first 3 years of my teaching career I was learning how to survive each day. My task was to get through the curriculum while still keeping school as enjoyable for the students as possible. Thus I concentrated on orchestrating a classroom full of students, keeping them "on task," rewarding good academic and social behavior with material and nonmaterial rewards, and including negative consequences for "poor student choices." Overall students and their parents responded well to this. Part of this orchestration was to present instruction in a variety of teacher-determined ways, including the occasional learning project. I created many "systems" in the classroom for everything from independent reading to small group management. Although I did this with input from students (I've been known as a very democratic teacher), I still put an emphasis on my being in control of each and every situation. I believe that nearly every conflict or negative situation could be traced to my overemphasis on teacher control, on being the giver of consequences.
In the 1993-1994 school year I was fortunate enough to get a group of students that would push me and teach me about what they needed and wanted for their education. The student labels ranged from "severely gifted" to "How do you deal with him every day?" As the months passed I found it increasingly harder to always be in control of the students. Projects would work well, whether individual or group, but anything that had even a smattering of more traditional whole group instruction would be met by resistance and/or conflict. Students would even divide themselves into factions, those who sided with the teacher, those who wouldn't, and a few who would articulate a third or fourth stance. A number of students could not focus on instruction long enough to be able to successfully complete many or most individual learning tasks. For these students I would regularly give them individual instruction immediately after I had given whole class instruction, helping them get successfully started on the practice task. Others would be finished with the practice task at about the same time I completed the whole class instruction. They "got it" right away and began working early even when they were told not to (waiting didn't make sense to them, and they would usually complete the task with a high degree of accuracy). For some of the students, a great number of the "learning tasks" were just busy work, they already knew how to "do it" successfully. As you can probably tell from this brief description, I was teaching most often to the middle ground (and sometimes to the lower middle). This seemed to work best for me, as most students seemed to stay "on task." But I had to ask myself, "Am I really meeting the needs of all my students?"
After having survived that year, I reflected quite a bit on my beliefs about teaching and learning. I came to realize that children are complex and that they need to have some control over what and when they learn, that they are, and need to be, an active participant in the learning process. It finally occurred to me that I had been keeping the focus of my classroom on myself, it was a teacher-centered environment and that in order for students to really learn and to enjoy school, I had to refocus on the children, to make my classroom a child-centered one.
At about this time I discovered the ideas surrounding multiage educational practices. For me the two mixed quite well. My needs to change the underlying beliefs and structure of my classroom were a near perfect match with the beliefs and structure of multiage educational environments (see appendix for a short list of multiage practices).
In addition to "student-centeredness," I also believe that school should be enjoyable. I realize that not all learning tasks are going to be viewed as fun for all students, but that if school in general is considered fun, then learning is fun and the motivation to learn more is enhanced. I believe that engendering a love of learning is probably one of the most important things I can help elementary age children achieve. With that, every other learning task comes relatively easily to a student. As John Dewey stated in Democracy and Education, "Study of mental life has made evident the fundamental worth of native tendencies to explore, to manipulate tools and materials, to construct, to give expression to joyous emotion, etc. When exercises which are promoted by these instincts are a part of the regular school program, the whole pupil is engaged, the artificial gap between life in school and out is reduced, motives are afforded for attention to a large variety of materials and processes distinctly educative in effect play and work correspond, point for point, with the traits of the initial stage of knowing" (p. 195)
As a result of my classroom being both student-centered and a place where learning is enjoyable, the educational opportunities I give my students are varied. Learners and the learning process are very complex. I believe that there is no one formula for teaching that fits all situations or all students. For this reason I believe that a variety of approaches thoughtfully geared to both the content to be learned and individual students is the best way to structure a learning program. This matches Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences Theory, there are many different ways knowledge can be gained and learning can be assessed. Hands on learning activities will work well with many students and with a number of content areas. Research projects jig-sawed among the class members facilitate learning best for some students and some subject areas. A discovery approach in which the tools for a learning task are given to the students, a simple question is asked, and the procedure is left up to the students to discover works well in other situations and with some students. Again, variety of learning opportunities allows for the most number of children to both enjoy learning and, if choice is incorporated into the activity, to give children some control over their education.
I believe that structuring classroom management to allow for a wide diversity of children and for shared student control of the classroom environment is at least equally important as academic goals. The degree to which a classroom is student-centered or teacher-centered shows up in its management structure. During parts of each day I have students take over various management tasks. Students manage the opening portion of each day (attendance, reading the schedule, discussing the weather forecast). Students also run a discussion/transition time in which we discuss the various books we are reading. These are things in which I can monitor but that don't need to be done by the teacher. Students in my classroom also have the privilege of choosing their seat. It is not uncommon for a child to be seated at four or more different places in the classroom during the day. They are given the responsibility to choose a place where they can best learn and where they are most comfortable. What a difference from when I assigned seats and decided whom would sit where based on my needs and my perception of each student's needs. By giving students some control over their school lives, I am supporting a belief within the students that they, and not some external force, has control of their behavior and their learning. That through their own effort they can achieve success. This matches the idea from Attribution Theory that learning is acquired through constructive effort.
As you can see, the two principals of student-centeredness and enjoyment of the learning process underlie all aspects of my classroom and are two cornerstones of my philosophy of teaching.
Appendix - Multiage Education
The term "developmentally appropriate" is used a lot by multiage educators. The idea, from the work by Piaget, that certain educational practices are appropriate for children of certain age spans but not for those of different age spans, allows the educator to design lessons that will match the individual child. This becomes important in a classroom of children of diverse ages. The interesting thing about Piaget's developmental levels and multiage education is how the idea is used to determine the age spans appropriate to be placed in a single classroom, and how multiage teachers use the diversity to help children transfer from one cognitive level to another. Multiage programs are most often considered "primary" or "intermediate," roughly matching Piaget's Concrete Operational Level, divided in two. This recognizes that some children transition from one level to another at different times and that there is a substantial qualitative difference between cognition at the Preoperational Level and the Formal Operational Level, the levels bordering the Concrete Operational Level. The transition from one developmental level to another is supported through peer interaction and modeling and takes into account the four factors that allow movement from stage to stage, maturation, experience, social interaction, and equilibration. The heavy use of peer modeling by multiage educators is supported by Albert Bandura's Social-Cognitive Learning Theory. By using these "live models," the student in a multiage classroom learns vicariously through the success of the model. In this way instruction is enhanced and learning is engendered through more than simple reliance on the teacher as model.
The following is from a brochure I have produced that explains to parents what underlying beliefs I have and some of the general methods I use in the classroom.
A multiage educational program is a union of an organizational structure and unique combinations of teaching and learning strategies. The way learning occurs is made possible by the multiple age structure.
Why Multiage?
• Allows for flexibility in the grouping of children according to need, ability, or interest; not just by age.
• Problems associated with a yearly transition from one grade to another can be overcome. The teacher has a nucleus of children; trained in the details of the class organization who keep it going while newcomers absorb it.
• As the student-teacher-parent relationship develops over a longer period of time, students will receive greater support for their success in school.
• A more natural learning situation is established. Children work at their own pace. Their program is not geared to the work of a single year but can be adjusted over two or more years.
• Benefits come to the older children from the quality of leadership and responsibility they develop.
• Younger children are stimulated intellectually by older children.
• Children have a broader social experience with increased opportunities to lead and to follow, to collaborate and to make stable peer relationships.
It is my goal to use instructional strategies that:
• Expand the teacher's role to include that of a facilitator as well as a source of knowledge.
• Produce cooperation.
• Allow students to learn from each other through peer tutoring.
• Give students responsibility and independence in both learning and behavior.
• Build understanding of action-consequence relationship.
• Provide choice to students in different areas of learning that will reflect learning-style differences.
• Allow continuous learning through the use of learning centers, group instruction, projects, and individual pacing.
• Involve parents in classroom activities.
• Encourage student responsibility and ownership of the learning environment.
• Teach goal setting from an early age.
• Build leadership skills in all students.
I have a website that explains to interested educators the "whats" and "hows" of multiage education. Please visit it if you are interested in more of the details of how I match my philosophy of learning and teaching to the nuts and bolts of everyday life with a classroom of 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders. Its URL is: http://www.multiage-education.com.