how can curriculum improve teaching and learning

1. DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES OF CURRICULUM IN
SCHOOLS
2.1 Three different types
• formal curriculum (core)
• informal curriculum
• the hidden curriculum

2. Formal curriculum
•. this is the curriculum that appears in
the curriculum guides, state
regulations or officially stated and
documented

3. The informal curriculum
This type of curriculum involves the subtle but
important personality variables of the teacher and the
way they interact with their colleagues and children.
•It also includes learning how to answer tests and
understanding what tests mean and the judgment
about students and their potential success in schools.
• Theses judgments result in children accepting them
or seeing themselves as described or labelled by the
teacher.

4. The hidden curriculum
• it is the unrecognized and is taught without formal
recognition, e.g being clean, being on time, etc. It is rarely
contained in formal curriculum, it contains ‘structured
silences’ (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1985) that embody
expectations and presuppositions about social conduct and
cultural differences/racial differences.

5. Continued…
• this is the curriculum that is used to track and differentiate children
by their ability
• It also represents the unrecognized and unofficial aspects of
designing or delivering the curriculum.
• Anything being taught in schools without being in any curriculum
guide is considered a hidden curriculum. The hidden curriculum
is by and large not a product of conscious intention.

6. Distinguishing between aspects of curricula
- the written
- the supported
- the taught and
- the tested
- The intentional curriculum is the set of learnings that the school
system consciously offers in contradiction to the ‘hidden’.

7. Curriculum Co-ordination and Articulation
• See Fig 1.1. and Table 1.1 on pp 4 and 5 of English (2010)
• Although teachers don’t have to be doing exactly the same thing in a
particular grade and subject, there has to be a connection and focus
• Coordination refers to extent of focus and connectivity present in and
across schools in a particular grade and subject
• Articulation refers to the vertical and lateral (horizontal) connectivity and
focus in a subject at a particular grade – not only in coverage of content of the
grade but in preparing for the next grade.

8. Current Practices and Complaints About
Curriculum
• that it is developed to assist teachers in identifying commonalities to teach in
line with local and state policies
• the school textbook is independent from the curriculum and in theory is not
meant to replace it but help implement it
• the writing of curriculum is flawed and based more on the local content,
demands and priorities instead of creating a philosophy first, followed by
goals and other priorities like social needs and knowledge requirements

9. Continue…
• Curriculum clutter
• In the US, teachers complain of too much to teach with much of it
unrelated because much of the curriculum is decentralized
• This is not the case here where the CAPS (to be discussed in future
sessions) directs what to teach at all levels of the school system
• The solution to clutter, according to English, (2010) is to engage in
the development of an overall rationale or philosophy that helps
develop the boundaries to examine what has been a big question
regarding curriculum: “What is worth putting in a curriculum?”

10. Continue
• Testing has become widespread in identifying what is worth teaching
• Testing has an influence in what has to be taught because the students must
know the answers for them to do well.
• Therefore many teachers teach to test
• Plato believed that an ideal curriculum is the one comprising of academics,
aesthetic, and athletics. This was based on the notion that the development
of a human being had to involve the mind, the body, and the soul

11. Site-based management and
Decentralization of Curriculum
Development
• Many countries have moved from centralization to decentralization wherein
site-based management has been given more responsibilities.
• Curriculum which is site-based should as a consequence also have a site-
based testing.
• The alignment between what is taught and tested should be carefully taken
into consideration hence the relationship between what is regarded as written
curriculum, the taught curriculum and the tested curriculum

12. Continue…
• The use of ‘quality control’ agencies in most countries
become a necessity to ensure that there is an alignment
of the three curricula mentioned above.
• Site-based management can be affectively used to
optimize the selection of methods or means of the local
school to optimize the ‘match’ in quality control

13. Loosely coupled systems and Teacher
Autonomy
• This refers to the looseness between schools and the system. It is not known
whether this looseness is successful in improving the children performance.
• Site-based management does not improve the results of the ‘cumulative’
curriculum as the cumulative impact of focused teaching is lost.
• A lot has to be done to improve the correlation between the written, taught
and tested curricular

14. Continue…
• Teacher autonomy is a problem to administrators in term of adequate supervision
and monitoring because amongst others, observation is always obtrusive and
changes the classroom environment
• The main avenue open to them regarding quality control is to tighten only required,
and not every area of the curriculum
• Therefore modern supervision and monitoring depend to a large extent on getting
teachers to monitor themselves and on ‘training’ teachers to follow the curricular
material published by relevant authorities.

15. The Deadening (Weaken, Lessen,
diminish) Impact of Textbooks
• In the US, most of the textbooks are not well-written due to the fact that
government demands the use of ‘readability’ formulas to determine the level
of difficulty of a text, which often leads to catering for the lowest common
denominator
• The use and reliance on textbooks in schools have increased resulting in a
‘watered down curriculum’ and easier content.
• According to Goldstein (1978) 75% of pupil’s classroom time involves the
use of a textbook

16. The Necessary Requirements of an
Effective Curriculum
• For the curriculum, to be effective, it must at least provide three essentials;
• Consistency
• Continuity, and
• flexibility (open to some interpretations depending on the context).
• One of the reason for this the individual learners’ differences and therefore
standardization is not recommended

17. Conclusion
• Good education leads to greater differences between
pupils and destandardizing education becomes imperative
in practice.
• Much of the school ideology is aimed as ‘controlling’
students by minimizing the differences between them
despite what the instruction emphasizes.

18. Next Two Sessions
• 2nd February Test
• What is curriculum
• Key concepts associated with Curricula
• 9th February Session
• Different Views about Curriculum
• Readings: English, F.E. (2010) Deciding What to Teach and Test, Corwin and Sage
Publications