Designing the Classroom Curriculum Designing the Classroom Curriculum | Page 29

Lynch, Smith, Howarth
instruction), about teachers’ plans for future learning, and about what they can do to assist…”
“School leaders require reliable information on student and school performances for effective school
management. Research into factors underpinning school effectiveness highlights the importance of
the school leader’s role in establishing an environment in which student learning is accorded a central
focus, and goals for improved performance are developed collaboratively by staff with a commitment
to achieving them. School managers require dependable pictures of how well students in a school are
performing, both with respect to school goals for improvement and with respect to past achievements
and achievements in other, comparable schools”.
“Governments and system managers require dependable information on the performance and
progress of individual schools if they are to exercise their responsibilities for the delivery of quality
education to all students” (Masters, et al., 2005, p1).
2. Curriculum as a Product
When visiting or interacting with teachers and children in a school, one gets a sense of over-arching culture
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. This culture is articulated overtly by way of vision and mission statements and covertly through the use of
language sets and in established attitudes and beliefs. Schools everywhere set objectives, often referenced to
the agency to which it belongs such as public education, catholic education, etc. and these objectives
collectively define the ‘product’ of that school. Teachers in the school become incorporated into that
school’s product. In more simple terms, curriculum in this circumstance comes to mean what the school
aims to achieve in students.
To reinforce the ‘curriculum’ product, the principal, as the curriculum leader in the school, has responsibility
for the development of a school-wide document known as the ‘school curriculum’. The school curriculum
mediates the syllabus in that it breaks each mandated KLA down into knowledge and skill bits according to
year or grade level and incorporates such things as study themes and defined units of work that reflect and
reinforce the culture of the school. Regardless of the objectives of the school curriculum, this approach to
curriculum development becomes a supervisory and accountability tool as the knowledge and skill
components it outlines are often checked to see that content has been ‘covered’ by the teacher.
3. Curriculum as Process and Praxis
As outlined previously, curriculum as a product is heavily influenced by the setting of specific chunks of
knowledge and skill and is supported by the development of various documents. In contrast, a process
curriculum focuses on what are believed to be universal developmental needs and other attributes of
individuals such as artistry and imagination by providing experiences that are thought to embody and
generate such qualities. Accordingly, listening to music for example and experiencing dance, drama, and
performances are thought to add to human growth potential. Similarly, content can be taught using such
things as “thinking processes” where a student’s capacity in the nominated thinking processes is deemed
more important than the content knowledge. Such processes are not difficult to document but they are
notoriously difficult to measure in a conclusive, evidential manner. Teacher preparation for this kind of
experiential curriculum is a similar process to that of the previous kind, but it contains a vastly different
orientation to content. Thus,
The same kind of general model can be seen in the VET and university sectors where syllabi are accredited either nationally or by internal processes sanctioned
by the national government.
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