Building a New "Paradigm"
Global Curriculum 3
  

 


Historically the process of learning has been represented by developing a theme, such as dinosaurs and then identifying the knowledge that the learner needs to know about dinosaurs. We did not clearly articulate what concepts our young learners would hopefully develop.

The new approach to curriculum design centers around identifying the key concepts which it is felt young learners should understand and from there develop the associated content and then finally a range of contexts.

The end point for most of this learning was "knowing" the body of knowledge, not necessarily understanding it or being able to apply that understanding to new contexts as they arose

The identification of critical knowledge should significantly reduce the necessity for knowing spurious content which has arbitrarily become a part of the core content of most contemporary curriculum documents. Critical knowledge is very specific and should be able to be easily identified by all the educators and learners.

A reduction in the amount of content that is necessary for learners to know is essential as it is no longer possible to teach all the content that has been traditionally prescribed via historical curriculum documents.

The reason for this is twofold:
  • Society now has a clear expectation of schools to make available far more than just the traditional content packages which were taught in the past. As described in chapter three, parents/caregivers have attempted to outsource many of the traditional parenting responsibilities to schools and this, coupled with the increased expectations on schools to make our young people more aware about technology in the learning environment, thinking skills, ethics, values and wisdom, has meant that the amount of time available for teaching the traditional contents is now considerably less than it was in the past.

  • The second issue which is constraining the amount of time available to teach traditional content is the desire to teach for understanding as an endpoint as opposed to the traditional approach of teaching to the endpoint of "knowing". The learning process of using inquiry means that the amount of content being taught is under severe pressure.
These two constraints have the effect of placing severe time constraints on schools ability to teach the traditional content. There is no standard percentage reduction on the amount of content being taught as each individual district and school will place a different emphasis on the amount of impact these two effects will have. Anecdotally it would appear to that the reduction in traditional content would be somewhere between 50-65%!