Curriculum Theory
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Food For Thought
Which theorist is your school's curriculum based from? Or do you know?
Do you share the same thoughts as any of these theorist? Why or why not?
How does knowing about theorists from the past help us today?
Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction
- What should be the educational objectives of the curriculum?
- What learning experiences should be developed to enable students to achieve the objectives?
Key Components
Jean Piaget
Schemas are categories of knowledge that help us to interpret and understand the world.
ex: a child may have a schema about clowns. If the child's only experience has been with circus clowns he might believe that every person with red hair is a clown.
Ralph Tyler
Assimilating causes individuals to incorporate new experiences into old experiences.
ex: A 2 year old child sees a man who is bald on top of his head and has long frizzy hair on the sides. To his father’s horror, the toddler shouts “Clown, clown”
an American educator who worked in the field of assessment and evaluation.
Accommodation involves changing or altering our existing schema in light of new information or new experiences. New schemas may be developed during this process.
ex: In the “clown” incident, the boy’s father explained to his son that the man was not a clown and that even though his hair was like a clown’s, he wasn’t wearing a funny costume and wasn’t doing silly things to make people laugh
With this new knowledge, the boy was able to change his schema of “clown” and make this idea fit better to a standard concept of “clown”.
Wrote a book called, Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction
Swiss Philosopher
Piaget's theory of constructivism argues that people produce knowledge and form meaning based upon their experiences.
His theory covered learning theories, teaching methods, and educational reform.
Piaget's theory of constructivism impacts learning curriculum because teachers have to develop a curriculum plan which enhances their students' logical and conceptual growth.
- How should the learning experiences be organized to increase their cumulative effect?
- How should the effectiveness of the curriculum be evaluated?
More than 25 years after the book was published, Tyler went back and reexamined the questions raised to look at the vast changes that have taken place in society and large scale curriculum development.
Beliefs on Education
Gives emphasis to the active role of the student in the learning process and implications student involvement has for curriculum development.
Gives emphasis to the need for a comprehensive examination of the non-school areas of student learning as they relate to C.D.
"The development of curriculum should not lose sight of the fact that the only behavior that is truly learned is the behavior the learner carries on with consistency so that it becomes part of his/her repertoire of behavior."
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Beliefs on Education
- School is primarily a social institution
- Education is a process of living and not a preparation of future living
- School must represent present life
What is Curriculum Theory?
John Dewey's Curriculum Theory
Believed curriculum should produce students who would be able to deal effectively with the modern world.
Academic discipline devoted to examining and shaping educational curricula.
Curriculum should incorporate how the child views his/her own world.
Franklin Bobbitt
Dewey's philosophy is that education has no end; it's an end in itself. The more education a person has, the better equipped he/she is to make decisions and live life based on a broad, global perspective that empathizes with the most peoples' needs and ideas.
In 1913 he launched the Social Efficiency ideology by demanding that educators learned to use the scientific techniques of production developed by industry.
More Johnny...
"The child has his/her own tendencies, but we do not know what these mean until we can translate them into their social equivalence. "
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Social Efficiency educators believe curriculum objectives must be stated in behavioral terms: as observable skills, as capabilities for action, as activities people can perform, and demonstrable things people can do.
"Educate the individual according to his capabilities. This requires that the material of the curriculum be sufficient various to meet the needs of every class of individuals in the community and that the course of training and study be sufficiently flexible that the individual can be given just the things that he needs" (Bobbitt, 1912)
Bobbitt believed that in order to prepare students for the industrial world, schools should replace classical subjects with subjects that correspond with social needs.
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