Planning
Like general problem solving models, curriculum and instructional
planning is a complex process which uses both divergent and convergent
thinking as initial ideas are first generated, broadened and then refined
into set instructional patterns. The following suggestions may help.
Questions for instructional development
The late Ralph Tyler (1949) offered some initial suggestions for
developing curriculum and instruction that may help you get started. I
have taken Tyler's four classic tenets of curriculum planning and offered
additional directions.
Tyler's Four Questions of Instructional Development
1. What are the purposes of the school?
(Think about, justify, and delineate what you are you going to
teach and how this material is relevant to the common, current purposes
of schooling?)
2. What educational experiences are related to those purposes?
(What content, processes and methods are you going to use to deliver
instruction and information?)
3. What are the organizational methods which will be used in relation
to those purposes?
(In the contexts of your educational purposes, how can you effectively
organize your information and presentations so that they are effective?)
4. How will those purposes be evaluated?
(Tyler, R. W. (1949) Basic principles of curriculum
and instruction. Chicago: University of Chicago.1)
If you have ever created a unit plan, or a series of complex, related
lesson plans, you have probably already asked yourselves these or similar
questions as a form of internal dialogue, or as an automatic, subliminal
process, as you first elaborated and then refined your educational intentions
and related educational directions. While Tyler's questions are certainly
a good place to start developing curriculum, in light of what we now know
about the complex journey of learning and how the human brain processes
and retains information, there are additional questions that may help you
create effective instructional plans and curriculum. Hopefully, these questions,
in addition to Tyler's, will aid you in creating material that is both
relevant and useful. Here are my added suggestions:
Wilson's Additions to Tyler's Principles
1. In the context of students' future needs, be able to justify why
you are teaching particular content or processes.
(Be able to provide a rationale for what you are teaching and
for how you are using students' time.)
2. Be able to make the content or processes more holistic.
(Teach the whole child through instructional techniques and processes
which actively engage multiple modalities and children's minds, bodies,
psyches, and social conscious nesses. Good instruction needs to be multi-modal
and holistic in order to be remembered. This approach creates multiple
neural pathways and has a better chance of being remembered and of meeting
different types of learning styles.)
3. Be able to make instruction relevant to students' experiences --
past, present, and future lives?
(Tie instructional strategies and content into students' experiences
-- make it real, make it applicable to their past experiences, their present
needs and their immediate futures.)
4. Be able to create more authentic types of assessment.
(Give students connections through meaningful assignments that
have direct applicability and carry-over into the real world.)
In order to create effective curriculum and instructional designs,
use Tyler's questions as a place to get started, and then use my questions
as a way to monitor instructional relevancy and applicability.
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