Introduction to Curriculum Design

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Introduction to Curriculum Design
Dr. Paul A. Rodríguez

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What is Curriculum Design?
Professional & School-based term
 Subject matter of schooling
 A kind of registry for what is taught
An exposure to content knowledge in English, mathematics, science, history, the foreign
language & so forth.
Curriculum in relation to the term instruction, implies some separation between what is
taught (curriculum) and how it is taught (instruction).
However, any determination about how to teach has to be made in relation to what gets
taught.
Eisner (1994)
 Series of planned events intended to have educational consequences for one or two
students
Taba (1962)
 All curricula composed of certain elements
 Aims and objectives
 Some selection and organization of content
 A program of evaluation of the outcomes
Tyler (1949)
 Formation of purposes (aim & objectives)
 Organization of experiences based on the purposes
 Evaluation of effects attributable to the experiences

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Daniel & Laurel Tanner (1995)
 Curriculum as the reconstruction of knowledge and experience that enables the
learner to grow in exercising intelligent control of subsequent knowledge and
experience
 School experience that will produce a certain account of knowledgeable learners
Dewey (1916)
 Education is connected to knowledge of life events and to educate individuals for
intelligent participation in society
Doll (1996)
 The formal and informal content and process by which learners gain knowledge and
understanding, develop skills and alter attitudes, appreciations and values under the
auspices of the school
Functions of Curriculum Design
The Latin derivative of the term curriculum is currere, which is associated with the idea
of running a racecourse.
In education, a course of studies represents a set of conditions that identifies what
students should learn and in what sequence, as well as ideas on how students will be
evaluated for the purpose of certifying their competence, or lack of it.
Working definition of curriculum:
“The deliberate and conscious design of the totality of he school experience in the
interests of producing an educational effect.”
Setting Boundaries
 Set boundaries or limitations on the school experience
 To identify the nature of an educational experience
 To see the curriculum in the life of the entire school

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Much of the boundary setting inherent in curriculum development work emerges from what we call
the normative agenda of schools.
This puts the act of curriculum development alongside the act of social planning and social control.
Boundary setting is all about social control.
John Dewey (1916) believed that “the first office of the school is to provide a simplified environment”.
The first principle to the organization of the school curriculum was:
 To focus and channel the school experience
 To ensure that the skills, values and knowledge we cherish are not lost.
However, we must also understand how to convert setting purposes and boundaries into educational
experiences.
Educational Experience
The character of an educational experience must be decided and pass through at least a three-part
test:
 The experiences must by design be responsive to the nature of the learner
 Be of value of the society
 Have some framework of useful and empowering knowledge
In other words, an educational experience must be calculated in relation to the developmental,
experiential and psychological dimensions of the learner, to the axiological foundations of
democracy, and to the teaching of usable and empowering knowledge.
The triad consists of:
 The learner
 The society
 The subject matter

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The curriculum experience must connect to the values of society. The purpose is to
make a rational or defensible demonstration of responsiveness to the key factors in
the educative process.
Totality of the School
The work of the curriculum relates to virtually everything that affects the school.
Extracurricular implies that some things in the school operate outside of the
curriculum .
Curriculum work is not:
 Limited to the classroom
 The development of instructional units
 The formation of general school policy
 Suffuses the totality of the school experience
Levels of Curriculum Design
Macrocurriculum
 Embraces the design of the all-school experience and concerns itself with building-level
design, factors, including the organization of courses across and within grade
levels, school-wide mission features, and school-wide (extra-classroom) experiences.
Microcurriculum
 Classroom-based judgments, including the planning and execution of classroom
instructional, pedagogical and assessment decisions.
Curriculum Design and Discretionary Space
Achieving some balance between framing the curriculum experience and allowing for the
exercise of teacher authority in the school. How do you create a curriculum design
that does not deny the emergent professional judgments of teachers?

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During the competency-based movement of the 1970s, a popular method of curriculum development
yielded ‘teacher-proof’ curriculum materials.
Teacher was the functionary in the school, carrying out the specifications of the curriculum according to
the orders laid down by curriculum planners. Curriculum is refashioned for teacher (s):
 Objectives
 Lesson designs
 Practice activities
 Student test
 Language scripted for teacher
The curriculum could bind the teacher into obediently yielding to external prescriptions like those
offered in teachers’ guides and other prepackaged curriculum materials.
However, in reality it takes creativity and intelligence to plan and implement educative engagements in
the classrooms. The teacher must have some room to conceptualize the classroom and its
curriculum according to some professional rationale.
Eisner (1998):
‘one function of well-designed curriculum materials is to free the teacher to teach, with ingenuity,
flexibility and confidence’
Dewey (1904):
‘teachers should be given to understand that they are not only permitted to act on their own initiative,
but that they are expected to do so, and that their ability to take on situation for themselves would
be more important in judging them than their following any particular set method or scheme’
A teacher should have some sense of what should be taught, and why it should be taught, leaving the
question of how it should be taught up to the teachers as they calculate it in relation to the student
population at hand and to certain professional elements.

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The development of curriculum is also central to fundamental equity issues in the education of
students.
The schools mandate that children:
 Learn to read
 Solve mathematical equations
 Strengthen their critical thinking
 Learn how to write
If this is so, then the school curriculum has an obligation to ensure that all children gain an equal
opportunity to learn all these skills. No matter how much freedom a teacher has in how to teach,
they are obligated to accept some direction from the curriculum.
Teachers can and should supplement or modify the curriculum in ways that are within professional lines
and that have a professional justification.
Testing Issues
The pressure to teach to the test is a pressure on the discretionary space of the teacher. In other
words, the core purposes of the curriculum are supposed to produce a flow of wide-ranging
experiences in the school are often lost and forgotten by teachers who are preoccupied with
testing priorities. Teachers get the signal that whatever is not tested is also not instructionally
worthy. Too much emphasis on testing?
There is a difference between teaching and testing. Curriculum developers, work with the idea of
testing what is taught, not the reverse. Using the test to evaluate the experience is the correct
direction of teaching.
Curriculum Standards
The purpose of curriculum standards are too:
 Ensure that all students receive the opportunity to learn a core of subject matter or knowledge
 A set of skills and knowledge appropriate for the education of all American youth
 Ensure equity for all students

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Ravitch (1995), emphasized:
 Need for curriculum standards to be tied to tests
 Unify school curriculum
 Give teacher4s an unambiguous sense of what is important to teach
 Standards should not be constructed in a manner that implies or requires some standardization or
uniformity of instructional practice
 Standards must avoid reducing themselves to test items on high stakes exams that will, far from
liberating teacher intelligence, only result in producing a teaching-to-the-test mentality
Instructional Issues
 Instructional procedures held to be universally applicable and appealing
 Effectiveness tied to instructional behaviors
 The how of teaching
 The management of established techniques or methodologies
 Teacher’s sense of worth tied to an ability to engage certain instructional manipulations
Like,
 Gaining the class’s attention
 Informing the class of the lesson’s objective
 Eliciting the ‘so-called’ desired behavior’ of the lesson
 Questions pertaining to the appropriateness of the objective are of secondary importance
 ‘time on task’, to keep learners engaged in classroom activities
Time on task is an idea that is rooted in exclusive instructional and managerial concerns.
Research shows that so-called effective teachers have high expectations for performance, that they
convey enthusiasm in their teaching and that they are vigilant about monitoring student work.
What about teachers of disadvantaged students:
 Ask low-level questions
 Tend not to amplify, discuss or use pupil answers
 Do not encourage pupil-initiated questions
 Give little feedback on pupil questions

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Hunter (1980) instructional technique, ‘Seven-Step Lesson’:
 Anticipatory Set
 Objective and Purpose
 Input
 Modeling
 Checking for Understanding
 Guided Practice
 Independent Practice
The reality is that the curriculum development process demands instructional variance, a
conclusion largely at odds with those who accuse it of shutting down teacher
judgment.
Ideas on Curriculum Design
1. What educational purposes should the school seek to attain?
2. What educational experiences can be provided that are likely to attain these
purposes?
3. How can these educational experiences be effectively organized?
4. How can we determine whether these purposes are being attained?
The management of purposes in the curriculum is not as simple as it might seem. There
must be a way to balance everything the schools need and want to do.
Determining what knowledge or content to include is not the only concern.
Schools need to develop a logical sequence and progression of experiences for all
the students to succeed.

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Experiences
For educators, school curriculum needs to define their sense of mission or purpose. At the macro level,
decisions on the nature of coursework within and across the grades levels need to be decided.
Teachers need to make decisions to the kinds of experiences the students are exposed to in the
classroom. The job of the curriculum developer is to provide a working framework that makes it
easy for a teacher to make instructional decisions in the context of purposes.
Teachers’ style of language, the gestures they use to convey various points, the behaviors they display
in various contexts, and the attitudes promoted by what they say and do all are part of the
phenomenon called pedagogy. Pedagogy allows the curriculum to go in a direction that the
teacher determines is best for the class. Such decisions of the teacher result of judgments that
have no precise or explicit sanction in the curriculum but nevertheless emerge from experience,
moved by decisions that the teacher makes in the best interests of the child.
Eisner (1998)
‘purposes need not precede activities; they can be formulated in the process of the action itself’. We
rely on good pedagogy for these types of judgments.
Evaluation
Evaluation is essential to the act of curriculum development. Educators evaluate in order to
understand outside whether they have reached the purpose they explicitly sought. The term
evaluate, is different than to test.
All tests represent some form of evaluation, meaning they make some contribution to our knowledge of
whether certain purposes have been attained.
Evaluation should be approached as an evidence of collection process, requiring innovative thinking
about ways to demonstrate whether core purposes in the curriculum have been fulfilled. Different
tools may be used and that is determined on what needs to be evaluated.
The evaluative component of curriculum development can help us determine where changes might be
in order for the curriculum.

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Curriculum design frames:
 The purpose of the School
 Helps to organize the means used to bring these purposes to life in the educational
encounter between teacher and students
Curriculum designers:
 Concern themselves with finding ways to evaluate the worth of these experiences
against stated purposes
 Determinations in the macrocurriculum reside mostly in the hands of a curriculum
leader who looks at all the components
 Pulls together a coherent program that includes decisions related to the organization
of coursework across and within grades
 Looks at the organization of various school-wide services and extra-classroom
activities
The teacher is the main curriculum worker at the microcurriculum:
 Teacher is empowered to make decisions on the curriculum
 Must be careful not to be too heavy-handed in the microcurriculum
 Must be free to pursue instructional actions that are not only consonant with the
curriculum, but also responsive to the particularities of the educational situation
 Be careful that the curriculum design does not unduly strict the teacher
 Be careful not to teach to the test
 Use only one type of instructional model in the classroom
 Be aware of the teacher’s discretionary space