Designing a whole curriculum is a very complex task. The intended curriculum, captured in content standards, has to be organized and worked out in learning trajectories and educational activities. Designers have to work together as a team, building a shared view on learning and teaching.
As this will be a challenge already, the educational activities will also be 'co-designed' by the teachers who play the central role in orchestrating the activities and guiding the students. Curriculum designers therefore have to communicate their intentions with the teachers and they have to anticipate the habits and possibilities of the community.
A curriculum is build upon a multitude of learning activities. In this session we shall discuss the design process at the level of individual activities.
A well-designed task should be meaningful and challenging for students, but also help them to learn the more general, abstract concepts captured in the intended learning trajectories and learning goals. On this level of curriculum design, not only tasks and problems, but also formats of interaction and collaboration have to be designed.
We shall pay special attention to project-based activities, as they form a rather innovative kind of task in which the work is directly connected with real-world applications and authentic practice.
Curricula can be divided into the intended, enacted, assessed, and learned curricula. For K-12 education, the intended curriculum is captured most explicitly in state content standards-statements of what every student must know and be able to do by some specified point in time.
The enacted curriculum refers to the content taught by teachers and studied by students. The assessed curriculum refers to the content tested. States, districts, and the U.S. government test various subjects at various grade levels. Teachers use their own tests to monitor student performance.
In the implementation of innovative curricula and learning arrangements, the teacher plays a crucial role. In implementation trajectories, therefore, solid professional development of the teachers is essential.
One way to help the implementation is to give teachers a role as co-designer of the educational materials and processes. This can be done in different ways. Teachers can actually be involved in the design process and cooperate with the designers. Another possibility is that the curriculum does not impose a fixed program, but offers teachers options to choose from. This enables teachers to design their own learning arrangements.