Ways of thinking that
shape the how we design
curriculum
Dr. Crawford & Prof. Asha Bijay
 Origin
- Latin word meaning, “
Course for racing”
 Four types of curriculum

Source: Cuban, L. (1995). The Hidden Variable: How
Organizations Influence Teacher Responses to
Secondary Science Curriculum Reform. Theory Into
Practice, Vol. 34, No. 1, 4-11.
What is curriculum?
 Official
Curriculum
◦ Set by district or state
Standards identify what
Content is to be taught
Expectation - teachers will
teach it
Students will learn it
Four types of Curriculum (1)

Taught Curriculum
◦ What teachers, working alone in their
classrooms, teach
◦ Their choices derive from their
 knowledge of subject
 Their experience in teaching the
content
 Their affection or dislike for the topics
 Their attitudes towards students daily
Types of Curriculum (2 of 4)

The Learned Curriculum: Beyond test scores, student
learn many unintended lessons embedded in the
classroom environment:
◦ They learn to process information in particular ways
and not in others
◦ They learn when to ask (or when not to ask)
questions
◦ They know when to act as though they are
attentive
◦ They may imitate a teacher’s attitude
◦ They learn about respect (or lack thereof).
The learned curriculum is much more inclusive than
others
Types of Curriculum (3 of 4)

The tested curriculum is a limited part
of what was intended by policy makers,
taught by teachers or learned by
students
◦ The more removed teachers are from
designing the tests, the worse the fit
between the curricula and the tests.
 Standardized tests have proven to
be the most inadequate of
assessments
Types of Curriculum (4 of 4)

Elliot Eisner, educational theorist likens
explicit curriculum to the official curriculum
◦ Revising the content of the explicit curriculum does
nothing to change the implicit curriculum
◦ See:
http://www.teachersmind.com/Curriculum.html

The null curriculum supports the implicit
curriculum
◦ See:
http://www.teachersmind.com/Curriculum.html
Explicit and Implicit Curriculum


What curriculum designers and/or teachers choose to leave
out of the curriculum is no less important than what they
choose to include
Those choices are based on a number of different factors.
◦ Educators have personal beliefs about the importance of various
parts of the official curriculum
◦ Current mindset, worldview, or paradigm of the culture or the
individual.
 Western worldview: the only valid way of solving problems of nature and
man is science.
◦ Stepwise and "objective" problem solving are specifically taught.
◦ Intuitive knowledge is ignored and sometimes actively discouraged. It is part of
the null curriculum.
◦ The "small chunk" mentality is so deeply ingrained that these big
ideas merely become handy titles for lists of specific facts to be
learned.
The Null Curriculum

The lists of laws, rules, principles,
definitions, and "steps" that make up
so much of the official curriculum
convey the implicit message that such
knowledge is absolute. There is little or
no discussion about how and why they
came into being—what problems made
them necessary. When the process
becomes separated from the product,
the human element disappears (Yero, 2010,
http://www.teachersmind.com/Curriculum.html).
Fundamental Problem

CAST:
http://udlguidelines.wordpress.com/introd
uction/what-is-meant-by-the-termcurriculum/
Curriculum
Educators focus on…
Whom
Where
(learning
(students) environme
DI & CRP assists us,
nt)
here
CRP assists us, here
What
(content)
UbD & DI assists us,
here
How
(instructio
n)
UbD & DI assists us,
here
So far we have begun to thinking about several
processes that would help us design more effective
curricula.
Towards shifting our
paradigm for Educating
Young People
What needs to change?
Read a portion of book, New kinds of
smart (take a look):
http://www.amazon.co.uk/New-KindsSmart-IntelligenceEducational/dp/0335236189#_
 A series of videos that introduce
expansive education:
http://www.pearsoncpl.com/2011/09/theexpansive-education-network-launch/

About Educating Young People
•School wide positive
behavior systems
•Positive behavior
support (not included in
this course)
Curriculum Design
Management Techniques
Instructional Strategies
•Identifying similarities
and differences
•Summarizing and notetaking
•Reinforcing effort and
providing recognition
•Homework and practice
•Non-linguistic
representations
•Cooperative learning
•Setting objectives and
providing feedback
•Generating and testing
hypotheses
•Questions, cues and
advance organizers
•Utilizing a variety of
ways of thinking
• Backward design
• UDL
•DI
•CRP
•And more….
First, though, here are Elements of
Effective Pedagogy

Similarities and differences:
◦ Educators should provide guidance for students to identify
similarities and differences
◦ Ask students to independently identify similarities and
differences
◦ Educators should represent similarities and differences in
graphic and symbolic form
◦ Students can identify similarities and differences in several
ways:
 Comparing
 Classifying (grouping things)
 Creating metaphors (identifying general patterns and comparing
it with a seemingly unrelated topic with the same pattern)
 Creating analogies (identifying relationships between pairs of
concepts)
Here are Instructional Categories
that affect Achievement

Take a look at these resources:
http://www.livebinders.com/play/play/42
9430
Materials: Curriculum Design

Summarizing and note-taking
◦ Requires being aware of an explicit structure
◦ Requires students to delete, substitute and
keep information. Here, for example, is a rulebased strategy for completing such a task:
 Delete trivial and redundant material,
 Substitute superordinate terms for lists (e.g.
“flowers” instead of “daisies, tulips, and roses.”
 Select or invent topic sentence
◦ Process demands a fair amount of analytical thinking
About summarizing and notetaking Source: Marzano, Pickering & Polock (2001)
Classroom instruction that works.