The Curriculum that you develop shows something of your philosophy and objectives. It is advisable to examine the viewpoints, perspectives and teaching approaches that influence the development of programmes.
There are many types of curricula.
1. Curriculum that are based on individual workbooks
Strengths of this approach:
- it is easy to get started
- you need few additional resources
- there are definite means of assessing children’s progress in certain areas
- testing and assigning a mark is easy to do
Possible Difficulties with this approach:
- it tends to consider education to be more like “filling a bucket” than “lighting a fire”
- it is geared to the child who learns from written verbal communication and children who learn from other learning styles are not catered for as effectively
- it does not develop relationship between teacher and pupil or pupil and pupil effectively, and these must be developed outside the structured learning programme
- the answers are usually self-checking and therefore must have one answer, which means that open questioning and higher-order thinking skills are not developed
- it assumes that each child will learn information in a certain order
- it tends not to be practical, using science experiments, trips and visits and research opportunities rarely, as these cannot be marked with a simple answer key, and are difficult to administer for teachers of students covering wide ranging topics
- it is book directed
- pupils study different topics at the one time
- it can be expensive because each child must have his own workbooks
2. Own Curriculum
Strengths:
- it enables to a school to develop its own unique flavour
- it enables a school to respond to the needs and interests of the children, teachers, and local community
- it enables the teachers to “own” their own curriculum which may facilitate greater enthusiasm about the work
Possible Difficulties with this approach:
- it is a lot of work
- it takes a lot of time
- it takes a lot of energy
- it is difficult to have cohesion between subjects and still have a balance within each subject
- it often results in isolation between teachers doing different topics
- it relies on the strengths or biases of staff at the time
3. Thematic God-centred Curriculum, e.g. The Interact Curriculum
Strengths
- it provides a focus that develops relationship with and a knowledge of God
- it facilitates development of godly character and attitudes
- it integrates subjects together naturally
- it strengthens a sense of community learning within family and school
- it allows for team teaching as an option
- it develops a wide range of thinking skills and learning styles
Weaknesses:
- it requires more teacher input than workbook learning (if you believe, as we do, that the role of and relationship with the teacher is the most significant part of the teaching process, this can be an advantage)
- it requires relationship and interaction with others and environment which therefore means time and energy (again, more difficult than workbooks but an educational advantage)
- assessment is more diverse than written tests making record keeping more difficult (again, this means that assessment is targeted by the teacher to student needs and actively evaluates a wider range of knowledge, understanding and skill)
