Presented by LorenzaToussaintPresented by LorenzaToussaint

Crucial Curriculum Issues• Development of thinking• Competition in education with other nations• Vocational Education• Moral Education• School Safety

Curriculum for Thinking• In 1894 – The Committee of Ten - held that the chief purpose of education was to “train the mind”

- compromised that all the principal subjects might accomplish this purpose of consecutively taught so that they would enhance the process of observation, memory, expression, and reasoning.

The Focus of a Thinking Curriculum

• Contrast in Goals for Thinking - a curriculum where students explore issues affecting their lives and the world.

• Social Reconstructionists’ Goals of Thinking - favor critical thinking - Bloom’s Taxonomy (logical thinking and reasoning

• Humanistic Goals for Thinking - value creative thinking - various exercises to explore the unfamiliar and creating something new -fluency (through such techniques as brainstorming) -flexibility (changing the focus of thought) -elaborating ( adding new material to existing ideas -risk taking (trying out a new idea)

Cont’d

Cont’d• Academicians’ Goals for Thinking - prize the paradigmatic or logico- scientific mode of thinking - based on categorization, conceptualization and the operations for establishing and relating categories. - 3 kinds of knowledge are taught:

1. Curriculum for Teaching Basic Operations -classifying, generalizing, deducing

Cont’d 2. Curriculum for Teaching Problem Solving -students learn the heuristics (helping to learn) of diagramming breaking a problem into sub problems, finding analogous problems and working backwards.

3. Domain-Specific Knowledge -current focus is not on the acquisition and coverage of subject matter but on how the subject can be taught so that students think about the content in fresh ways and acquire intellectual tools that can be useful in other contexts.

Curriculum Competition: An International Comparison

• See Table 11.1 – Results of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)

- U. S. ranked 24th among nations whose 18-24 year olds are

earning advanced science or engineering degrees.

- Poor performance of U. S. students on conceptual tasks may

reflect U. S. teachers’ traditional practice of emphasizing

procedures rather than connecting concepts to acting.

- Is the curriculum in the U. S. schools lagging behind those in other

countries? If so, why and what should be done about it?

Cont’d• PISA (Program for International Studies Assessment, 2000)

results indicated five factors that are necessary for success in school learning and continued study and learning:

- using strategies for learning

- enjoying reading

- taking responsibility for reaching both goals set

by teachers and one’s own goals.

- believing in one’s ability to learn and achieve.

- knowing situations where cooperative or

competitive learning is more appropriate.

Vocational Education

• Education “through” work

- subjects are coordinated with work-related

experiences (Ex. Cooperative Education)• Education “about” work

- examine the world of work—become aware of

career choices.• Education “for” work

- prepared for entry into a “family” of occupations for

specific careers.

Cont’d4 issues face curriculum planners:

1. Purpose – should it aim at broad intellectual

development and guidance.

2. Access- should it open to the slow as well as to the

gifted?

3. Content- how well does it match the present and

future needs of the economy?

4. Organization- should it be restructured in order to

close the gap between the vocational programs of

the school and the requirements of work?

Contrasting Purposes for Vocational Education

• Early Rationale

- offered manual training as complementary to

academic studies and necessary for the balanced education for

all students. It was a more meaningful way of learning by doing.• Current Thinking about Purposes of Vocational Education

- rest on 3 arguments:

- national interest (pipeline programs with foundation

technical training and academic courses in high school and

advanced courses at the college level, with work-related

experiences.

Cont’d - equity (help the young, refugees, and the hard-to-employ to

find a place in the economy)

- human development (underscores the intrinsic value of work.

Students gain a sense of how things work – televisions, cars,

businesses.

Content of Vocational Education• Daniel Hull and Leno Pedrotti suggested a means of designing a

curriculum for high tech occupations:

1. a common core consisting of basic units in mathematics, the

physical sciences, communications, and human relations.

Cont’d 2. a technical core of units in electricity, electronics,

mechanics, thermics, computers, and fluids.

3. a sequence on specialization in lasers or electro-

optics, instrumentation and control, robotics, and

microelectronics.

Trends in Vocational Education

• a progressive innovation that introduces broad content.

• dictated by economic rationalism aimed at sorting and ranking students as productive workers.

• Congress has influenced curriculum by demanding that recipients of vocational education funds to teach job-specific skills and assist students from low-income families to go straight from high school into the job market.

Moral Education

• Phenix’s Basic Questions in Moral Education

- values, standards, or norms, and the sources and justification

for these norms.

4 approaches:

1. The Nihilistic Position – a denial that there are any standards of

right or wrong.

2. The Autonomic Position – view that norms or values are

defined by each person is the

cornerstone of the autonomic

position.

Cont’d 3. The Heteronomic Position – asserts that known standards and

values can be taught and can

provide clear norms of judgment

for human conduct.

4. The Telenomic Position – holds that morality is grounded on a

comprehensive purpose.

Character Education

• During the 1960s through early 1980s, values clarification dominated moral education and the teaching of ethics.

• Values clarificationists’ think that the exploration of personal preferences helps people to:

- be more purposeful because they must rank their priorities

- be more productive because they analyze where their

activities are taking them

- be more critical because they learn to see through the

foolishness of others

- be better able to handle relations with other.

School Safety

• Reece L. Peterson and Russell Skiba stress the importance of improving “school climates” to create safe schools by:

1. parent and community involvement

2. character education

3. violence-prevention and conflict-resolution

curricula

4. peer mediation

5. bullying prevention.