Curriculum Design and Development
The development of the school curriculum is perhaps the most important—and more often than not, least appreciated—prerequisite to high-quality instruction. As Marzano maintains (see What Works In Schools, 2003), a “guaranteed and viable curriculum” is the school-level factor (that is, not primarily a student- or teacher-level factor) that most affects student achievement. While Marzano doesn't state a preference for any singular curricular approach, he instead advocates for the following two important points: the curriculum must be attainable in the time available and must actually be taught to students.
When it comes to the development of curriculum, opinion is generally split into two camps:
(1) The progressives maintain that core curriculum must be set aside (for a variety of reasons) in favor of teaching the skill sets needed for modern social living and working—specifically the critical/higher-order/problem-solving skills related to abstract thinking (see most educational research last century).
(2) The back-to-basics advocates maintain that a rigorous core curriculum leads to the development of well-educated students and increases the likelihood that critical/higher-order/problem-solving skills (which they believe can't be taught directly, for a variety of reasons) will be developed over time (see, for example, Hirsch: The Schools We Need & Why We Don't Have Them, 1996).
As with the solution to the phonics-whole language debate (or most any other ideological debate, for that matter), the solution lies in the successful merging of the best arguments from both camps into an ideal, yet achievable, third option.
In this instance, I propose that schools must take several steps to assure their curriculum is attainable, of high-quality, and viable across the whole of the student's education.
(1) Schools must to develop a rigorous curriculum that provides specific objectives for each course or grade level; no more heady, ambiguous statements that can't be measured in any practical way. These are of no use to teachers who must guarantee that students leave their classrooms with the same foundational knowledge as all other students leaving the same class or grade level under a different faculty member. Therefore, objectives like this—“understands the relative magnitude and relationships among whole numbers, fractions, decimals, and mixed numbers”—have no place in an attainable, high-quality curriculum.
As Hirsch explains, all students must enter second grade with some measure of common knowledge to be drawn upon by their new teacher; precisely because experiences outside of school are so disparate (culture, socioeconomic status, parental educational level, etc.), it is incumbent upon schools to provide this core base of common knowledge over the whole of the student's education.
However, in implementation, Hirsch and I part ways. The simple truth is, we are not going to have national (or even state, in most cases) curricula any time soon for a whole host of reasons. That said, school districts must take it upon themselves to develop consistent objectives for each particular course or grade level.
To do so, curriculum development teams must (a) be composed of faculty with expert understanding of the subject matter; (b) understand and implement all aspects of good curricular design; and (c) consult documents created for guidance in curriculum development (e.g., national standards documents). A word of warning, however, these documents are replete with the unspecific objectives previously noted. In most cases, they should not be seen as a source for objectives to include in the district curriculum; rather, they should serve as a cross-check to the content and skills included in the district curriculum, allowing for observation of omissions.
(2) The objectives must be placed into a hierarchy. Objectives must be labeled using an appropriate coding system with respect to the expectation for student achievement; that is, is the objective to be introduced, mastered, or reviewed (having been mastered in previous years)? Additionally, critical objectives must be highlighted as such. These objectives are those which without fail must be mastered in order for students to have any hope of success in following years. Alternate enrichment objectives should also be provided for advanced students who quickly master the requisite basics.
Thinking of it this way may help: for each curricular topic to be addressed, we provide two essential lists: (a) the “must haves” list, which provides the objectives all students are required to attain during the course or school year; and (b) the “we hope” list, which provides things that would be nice to get to, but not if it means sacrificing the “must haves.”
(3) Repetition must be reduced or eliminated, and fail-safes imposed.
(4) Specific resources for use in attaining the objectives must be named or provided in the curriculum.