Principles of Curriculum Design
Student: Dr. Freda Doster
This course was intended to introduce educators to the rudiments of curriculum design. This course involved students in an examination of fundamental principles of curriculum development for K-12 school settings. After completing this course the student should be able to:
1. Explain procedures for selecting educational purposes.
2. Explain procedures for selecting learning experiences.
3. Explain procedures for organizing learning experiences.
4. Generate guidelines for constructive curriculum development.
The following excerpt was taken from from a paper written to fulfill partial requirements for the above class. Readings from Dewey and Bowers were compared and a set of guidelines for constructive curriculum development were generated. These guidelines were developed a part of a group project which included fellow classmates Tom Bledsoe and Dan Sarago.
Guidelines for constructive curriculum development:
Dewey
� Focus on student growth
� Focus on relationships
� Educate everyone on the needs of the learners
� Equality
� Cooperative experiences
� Each individual has something to contribute
� Democratic
� Involve teachers in curriculum development
� Avoid autocratic decision making
�� it must be said that the democratic principle requires that every teacher should have some regular and organic way in which he can, directly or through representatives democratically chosen, participate in the formation of the controlling aims, methods, and materials of the school of which he is a part� (p. 222, Dewey).
Bowers
� Causal conditions --- intervening processes --- end results
� Conditions which effect basic life of a group are the �organizational climate�
� Decision making should be shared
� Group process is critical
� Constructive process is incremental (cf., �lag time�)
� Cooperation is critical
� Quantitative information is needed
� Should involve diagnostic procedures
� Should be developmental
� Should be participative
� Collaboration is important
� Reduces conflict
� If leaders/managers/administrators are not supportive, then destruction can take place
� Teachers are influenced by their leaders� own behavior
� Constructive change takes a long time and is a gradual process
� Coercion is counter productive to change
��constructive change is a gradual process of successive increments; both because lag time causes it to be so and because movement cannot at any point exceed the currently legitimate boundaries of participants and succeed� (p. 142, Bowers).
Bower�s work answers Dewey�s question in that he provides an overview of the process for implementing democracy in the school via the participative model. Curriculum form should start with an assessment of what the results are via testing students; the remedies for change, therefore, must come from those closest to the implementation of the curriculum but by way of top-down �permission� to implement the change. Teachers may be the ones to make the changes after some consensus is reached about where the educational process is to take the student.
References:
Bowers, D. G. (1977). Implementing System 4 Concepts.. Systems of Oranization. Ann Arbor, MI: Universtiy of Michigan Press.
Bowers, D. G. (1977). The Organization as a Social System. Systems of Oranization. Ann Arbor, MI: Universtiy of Michigan Press.
Dewey, J. (1937). Democracy and educational administration. First published in Official Report of the Convention of the Department of Superintendence of the National Education Association (Washington, D.C.:American Association of School Administrators, March 1937, 48-55), 217-225.
Dewey, J. (1935). Toward Administrative Statesmanship. First published in Social Frontier 1 (March 1935, 9-10, as "John Dewey's Page"), 345-347.