First of all, it is extremely important to decide and shortlist the guiding principles of the curriculum because there are many diverging views and schools of thoughts. All of these views focus and look at things from their lenses but to have well-rounded citizens of society, we will have to have inclusive approach and select pros from each of the curriculum philosophies, domains and theories to best serve the community.
Guiding Principles short list
Here are five steps of the curriculum development.
- Selecting Guiding Philosophies
- Selecting Guiding Learning theories
- Selecting grade level and subject
- Writing learning outcomes
- Analysis
- Selecting Guiding Philosophies
I would like to choose following three philosophies and take their principles to build curriculum.
- Progressivism
- Reconstructionism and co-construction
- Perenialism for religious values
Society needs variety and it has many different approaches for different issues. For examples, all of us agree that when it comes to Halal and Haram of edible items then we don’t need verdict from science and we must go back to the divine guidelines. So certain aspects of our curriculum will be drawn from the perenialism approach to have our morality based on divine guidelines. We must also not deny the reality that if we want to integrate ourselves with the dynamic world then we must apply progressivism approach. We must learn sciences and try new ideas. Students must learn rationales that explain natural phenomenon. Moreover, once they have mastered those rationales then they should be able to make devices that can use those principles to better serve community around them. A body of knowledge that does not translate into a product and does not serve mankind is not worth and is not valued any more.
In the modern era of social networks, where people learn and build on their previous knowledge by interacting with other bodies of knowledge, social reconstruction of knowledge is very important. Our curriculum must encourage students to interact with peers, teachers, www resources, printed resouces and integrate their knowledge with other bodies of knowledge. Moreover, learners must have exposure to social problems and they should devise methods to improve society around them. So our school will become agent of social change
- Selecting learning Theories
There are many learning theories and best of each need to chose as a guiding principles for developing curriculum. Following learning theories can help set guiding princples.
- Humanism
- Behaviorism
- Cognitivism
- Constructivism
This will help us visualize the product of our curriculum. What kind of people we want to have in 10 years from now. What kind of attributes we want to embed in our next generation. We can enlist those attributes and analyse our curriculum according to that at each stage of curriculum development. For example, we want our next generation to be agents of change, well-rounded personalities, passionate and useful member of society. These are well-recognized international attributes of global minded humanist approach. Our curriculum will have to small discrete tasks that conditions students to produce the above behaviours in long-run. Moreover, students will have to engage in many cognitive tasks that condition them to have critical thinking, creative thinking and interpersonal skills to serve their community in better way. Moreover, we want them appreciate the bodies of knowledge around them, interact with those bodies of knowledge and, consequently, construct their knowledge by building on their prior knowledge.
We also want to encourage students to have attributes of the modern paradigm to help them better integrate with rest of the world. This will allow learners to be goal-oriented individuals who are driven by the progress and can compete to better fit in the environment. They will become more efficient to meet measurable targets (KPI: Key performance indicators). To achieve this, they will have to have rational approach to life and stop waiting for miracles to happen to save them. They are also expected to have empirical knowledge by scientific method to improve their critical thinking. Our curriculum will have contents organized in a way to encourage the production of above listed attributes. Moreover, it will support and guide teachers to deliver the curriculum in a way that provides right experiences for conditioning them to above listed attributes.
3.Target Grade Level and subject:
At this stage, curriculum committee will select the grade and age group level for which they are tasked to design curriculum. This will help them make rational decisions about sequence of contents according to ZPD (Zone of proximal development) and also to maintain the balance between challenge and anxiety level of learners. Contents should be progressively getting difficult but challenge level should not exceed the limit that discourages students from further explorations. The contents should be horizontally linked in the subject for that years and they should also be vertically linked to previous and next year course contents. This sequencing of knowledge should allow students to build on their prior learning. Breadth and depth of the course contents is also very important at this stage. There must be a nice balance between the two and time that students have. If the breadth is too wide then students may have to remember lot of information without knowing and understanding the rationales of them. This will encourage rote learning and, most likely, students will forget everything once they have passed/failed the final course exam. Moreover, time-allocated to the course contents is also important because if teachers don’t have enough time then they are going to rush through the contents without paying attentions the quality of the delivery of contents. Another challenge, at this stage, is accuracy of contents because some time to make things simple, accuracy is compromised. Curriculum designers need to pay attention to the fact that contents are not providing inaccurate information to students. This will cause them frustrations in coming years. This happens quite often in science in models of atoms. In earlier years, students are taught planetary model of atom but when they go to college, they are told that planetary model is wrong and quantum mechanics model is correct version. Students, right from the beginning, should be told that planetary model was proposed about long ago and it has its draw backs rather than teaching it with religious enthusiasm as divine guideline.
- Prescribed Learning Outcomes
At this stage of curriculum development, learning outcomes should be listed. I liked the explicit approach of curriculum. Discrete tasks should be listed after selection appropriate contents. The learning outcomes should be
- measureable & observable ‘learning objectives’
- contact hours, they should specify time that can allocated to meet that learning outcomes
- time for activities , There should be some suggested activities with the time allocated to them
- lessons plans , There should also be some lesson plans, I am not favour of spoon feeding the teachers and providing them lesson plan for each topic. They should be provided some samples and provided some autonomy to try few things on their own because such activities require different material and not all schools are equipped with the required materials. Teachers should be guided to come up with their own ways to deliver the contents with whatever they have.
- Sample assessment question should also be provided that focus of diagnostic, formative and summative assessment. Such samples should also link the assessment questions with the revised bloom taxonomy to encourage students to phrase/word question better. Teachers should be encouraged to make their questions by using bloom’s taxonomy as a rubric,
- Analysis
Analysis should be conducted at each stage of the curriculum development to make sure that everything fit together coherently. All contents, learning outcome, lesson plan and activities should have not only consistency but also produce citizens according to the selected guiding principles
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