Week 3 Blog (Darling-Hammond et al., Educational Goals and Purposes: Developing a Curricular Vision for Teaching)


     In this passage the author had talked about the importance of curriculum, the reason why teachers should learn about curriculum, develop a curricular vision for teaching, plan a curriculum, make curriculum decisions, consider education goals and purposes to design a curriculum. Curriculum has many meanings. Curriculum is from New Latin in which language it means “a course of study.” To many people, curriculum is the subjects that students must study, such as Chinese, Math, English, Biology, or the list of topics that included in a course or syllabus. In education, a curriculum is broadly defined as the totality of student experiences that occur in the educational process. The term often refers specifically to a planned sequence of instruction, or to a view of the student's experiences in terms of the educator's or school's instructional goals. 

     So, why should teachers learn about curriculum? Curriculum as the learning experience and goals the teacher develops for particular classes-both in her planning and while teaching-in light of the characteristics of students and the teaching context (Beauchamp, 1982; Macdonald and Leeper, 1965). Teachers need to know and understand why they teach, what they teach, how they teach. What are the influences will a curriculum have on classrooms, students? Having a curriculum provides several benefits, such as providing a structure for an educational course and having an end goal that teachers set for their students to reach.Although the structure and detail of curricula depends primarily on the subject at hand, curricula serve the broad purpose of being educational planning tools. They help teachers and professors outline learning objects for a course or class, which in turn sets an end goal for learning a specific volume of material.

    Students are different from each other. Different students have different needs and different interests. How teachers can provide or create equitable classrooms that support all students, draw connections to students’ prior knowledge and experiences, choose appropriate starting places and sequences of activities, develop assignments and assessments to inform learning and guide future teaching for different students depending on their needs? Teachers need to consider students’ needs and interests, social development, learning environment and make their curriculum adapt to teaching. For example, before the Opening policy in China, many people do not know what is English, many students only study Chinese, Math, Art and other subjects except English or Japanese. However, as the globalization many people begin to learn EnglisH, Japanese and other language. So, the curriculum should be changed when the whole environment changed. 

    When plan a curriculum educators should know the education purpose, what they need to teach? What is important to study? They identify what will be done, who will do it, and what schedule to follow. ? And as the technology developing so fast today, educators should also use the technology. Teachers need to be able to consider the role of technology as they plan curriculum. After the planning and teaching teachers should also make their own evaluation according to different students so teachers must have a further communication with their students and know what they have learned, whether the knowledge is really what they need and whether the knowledge is helpful. Just like the author said, teachers must have knowledge of what changes they might make in how they organize and deliver instruction on strengthen students learning for individual students, groups of students who are underperforming, or the entire class or school. Besides, many people still do not like computers because they appear to make life so much harder. One way around this is to use people-friendly book covers instead of long lists.Teachers should also use the new technology tools when teaching to let students benefit from the kind of curricular vision that underlies the seemingly effortless classroom and encourage students adapt to today’s development. 

Comments

  1. AnonymousFebruary 1, 2019 at 8:24 PM

    Thank you for sharing and insightful input on this week's reading. The concept of a teacher's understanding of the objectives of their curriculum serves as an essential component to the educational development of students. As it was mentioned in the reading and in your blog post, teachers should not only have the understanding and freedom to structure a curriculum around the needs of the students, but the students' interest could serve how a curriculum is developed. How can we discern the interest of each student, and how can we implement each's student's interest into a lone curriculum. Should students whose interests lie in creatives arts have their math curriculum altered from a system of meticulous numbers and formulas into something more abstract and aesthetically pleasing? Many would say that structuring a curriculum around the interest of the student in order to maximize student's learning potential is shy of impossible. But a teacher's knowledge of how to assess the interest of their students in order to plan instruction, activities, and assessments can serve as a way for the teacher to assess the interest and the needs of the student, if given the freedom.

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  2. April McFaddenFebruary 17, 2019 at 3:58 PM

    "So, the curriculum should be changed when the whole environment changed. " I agree with this in part, Curriculum should evolve with society. I'm curious to what end? How much and how far should curriculum should evolve with the times? When Russia won the space race, the U.S. raced to be the first on the moon and that led to an intense prioritization of STEM in schools. And even now, to be competitive on a global scale, STEM education is being proactively pushed in schools. How can we bring in new priorities without forgetting other needs and interests.

    You talked about the importance of having a curriculum vision and having that guide your teaching. What stuck with me the most in the reading is that "Well prepared teachers have developed a sense of 'where are they going' and how they and their students are going to get there." (Darling-Hammond et al., 177). Since NCLB, high stakes testing got the best of even a "well prepared teacher." Where they are going became the test at the end of the year. Having spent my elementary education (2000-2004) in the start of high stakes standardized testing that pressure that they educators where under was felt by students.

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  3. AnonymousMay 3, 2019 at 8:10 PM

    Thanks for sharing this blog. I like the way that you summarize this article. This article was mainly about what curriculum is and why the curriculum is so important for the teachers to teach. I am totally agree with you that students are different from each other and different students have different needs. I think as educators, we should consider more about diversity when we design for the curriculum. From my own experiences, not all the students can accept and understand the knowledge that teacher teached.

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