Curriculum Design Process



Curriculum Design Process

Introduction

One of the priorities of curriculum development is to achieve the quality of modern education that meets the current needs of the individual, society and state. To a large extent the conditions of effective implementation of educational policies determined at the level of educational institutions and set out in its educational program. Aims and objectives of the educational program, requirements of state standards in one way or another educational field is realized through programs for academic subjects. The program on subjects - the result of a large hard work from different areas of expertise: experts in a particular science, defining the basic terms of knowledge, skills, educators and psychologists that generate and distribute material on years of training in accordance with the age limits of children, practitioners, developing research methodological support necessary for the effective assimilation of knowledge and skills. In each program, accumulated learning experience of a science reflected its achievements (Connelly, 2008).

Curriculum Development

Fortunately, the curriculum studies field has yielded a historical model of curriculum development that accounts for the comprehensive dimensions of the school experience. General consensus, embodied in the work of, among others, J. Wesley Null, Daniel Tanner and Laurel Tanner, and Peter Hlebowitsh, points to a procedural definition of the curriculum development process that includes the tasks of planning, implementing, and evaluating the school experience. Such a view necessarily accounts for some conceptualization of what gets taught (via subject matter, values, and skills) as it intersects with teacher decisions over how to teach and how to demonstrate whether learning has actually taken place. Originally articulated by Ralph Tyler, and later by Hilda Taba, such a view of curriculum development can be conceived as a three-part process that includes (1) some statement of purposes (embodied as specific objectives and content organization), (2) some instructional response on how to teach in relation to explicitly articulated purposes, and (3) some program of evaluation of outcomes.

Tyler Rationale, set the foundation for the design of the school curriculum, as evidenced by later efforts to expand upon the four questions, notably in the work of Taba, who identified a seven-step curriculum development process that included (1) diagnosis of needs, (2) formulation of objectives, (3) selection of content, (4) organization of content, (5) selections of learning experiences, (6) organization of learning experiences, and (7) determination of way to evaluate. The Tanners assert that Tyler and Taba worked out of a progressive tradition that had its ancestry in John Dewey's phases of reflective inquiry, which helped to frame the idea of curriculum development in relation to a problem-solving process (Jackson, 2002).

The act of curriculum development, however, requires thinking that goes beyond its procedural nature. Obviously, some theoretical direction has to be provided to help educators navigate through the curriculum development process so that when educators are faced with the prospect of, say, converting purposes into classroom experiences they have some theoretical direction for decision making. To this end, Tyler articulated the need for the curriculum development process to be filtered ...