Curriculum: Definition and Purpose
Posted by Hope Scott on Sunday, January 23, 2011 Under: curriculum management
How do you define
curriculum? Curriculum is what teachers
need to teach and what students need to learn to master a course. The curriculum
must include all that students need to be able to do and understand prior to
going to the next level or grade. It also must prepare students for assessments
to be administered throughout the course and at the end of the
course.
What do you see as the
purpose of curriculum? The purpose of curriculum
is to prepares students. If teachers did not have well thought out and planned
curriculums, students would not be prepared for the next level. I teach Web
Design classes. I expect my students to have learned (and still remember) basic
computer skills prior to taking my class. I teach my class as if they have had
MSWord, MSPublisher, Excel, and other basic word processing programs. The
curriculum in BCIS (renamed this year to BIM) should prepare students to created
any type of document or spreadsheet. My course builds upon that knowledge and
takes students to the next level.
Given state requirements,
how can curriculum best be designed and managed to reflect the goals of an
individual school and the needs of its students? The state and NCLB expect
students to have a progression from one point to the next. Anything that is
stale and stagnant is usually stink or dead. So the goal of education and
curriculum is to have students grow towards goals beyond the walls of lower
education, to higher education and beyond. Curriculum has to be designed to
match the needs of the students in individual schools. No school is made up of
students who think and learn the same way. We have to take many things into
consideration when creating curriculum, including special needs of not just
special education students but of gifted students. We have to look at the
demographics of our student bodies, its strengths and weaknesses. We also have
to look at the economics of our schools. For instance, schools in a wealthier
district can afford to provide special incentives and programs their student
body. They can afford to have tutors and smaller class sizes to ensure success
for all.
Tags: curriculum
I am a Web Technologies teacher. I created this blog as part of my Master of Education in Educational Technology Leadership for Lamar University, Beaumont, Texas.
