Teacher Training Lesson Plan: Examining Traditional Curriculum

Targets: Evaluate the traditional approach to curriculum design

Materials: White board, board marker, Traditional Curriculum Design (handout - one per student)

Introduction (5 minutes)

Explain the following in your own words:

Unless you plan to teach students for only one class, you usually plan lessons in the form of units. A unit is a set of lesson plans that work together to reach particular learner objectives. There are many different methods for unit planning, and much of what you use to plan your units will be based on your schools standards or benchmarks for the level and subject you are teaching.

Today we're going to look at the traditional approach to curriculum design. If the curriculum you're working with is based largely on outdated or inefficient methods and techniques, do your best to think outside the box about how you can adapt it to suit your students' need and incorporate some modern methodology.

The Traditional Approach (20 minutes)

Ask students to take out some scrap paper. Write the words "traditional education" on the board. Ask the write down whatever words they think of. Give them about 5 minutes to brainstorm and then have students share their answers. Write the words they share on the board to make a word web. Depending on the students' own experiences, you will get different words.

Review the six types of thinking, from basic to abstract, used in Bloom's taxonomy. Ask students to explain each type. If this is new for them, take some extra time to differentiate between lower level and higher level thought processes.

• Knowledge - facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject

• Comprehension - the action or capability of understanding something

• Application - the action of putting something into operation

• Analysis - detailed examination of the elements or structure of something, typically as a basis for discussion or interpretation

• Synthesis - the combination of ideas to form a theory or system

• Evaluation - the process of forming an idea, judgment or appraisal of something

Ask students, in traditional curriculum, "Which of these types of thinking are most used?" Students should respond that only the lower level skills, knowledge and comprehension, are primarily used in traditional education.

Activity: Examining the Traditional Approach (30 minutes)

Put students in groups of 3 or 4. Hand each student a copy of the "Traditional Curriculum Approach" handout. Tell them that they will read two excerpts from critiques of the traditional educational approach. Ask them to highlight or underline any key words or phrases. After 15 minutes, encourage them to discuss the excerpts in their groups. Write the following discussion questions on the board to get them started:

1) What is the main point of excerpt #1?

2) Do you agree with the point made by Beane in paragraph 1?

3) What are the main points made by Marion Brandy in excerpt #2?

4) Are these same problems present in _______ (your country's) educational system?

Summary & Review (5 minutes)

Traditional curriculum tends to focus on transferring information from the teacher to the students, whether it is facts or formulas. It can be summed up as "telling," and it generally puts great emphasis on preparing students for examinations.

Text for Handout:

Excerpt #1: North Central Regional Educational Laboratory

Excerpt #2: Brandy, Marion. "The Real Basics." 2007

Brandy lists 21 factors as to why the traditional curriculum in America needs to be revised. Here are some of her strongest points, as well as part of his conclusion. I chose numbers 8, 9 and 15 for discussion in this teacher training session. To get the whole text, go the Marion Brandy's website and click on "The Real Basics" PDF file on the bottom left-hand section of the page.

"8. The traditional curriculum casts students in passive roles, as absorbers of existing knowledge rather than as active creators of new knowledge. The future, unknowable, demands a curriculum that teaches how to construct knowledge.

9. No convincing case is being made for the relevance of the content of the traditional curriculum. "You'll need to know this next year," "It's in the book," and "This will be on the test," aren't arguments likely to convince students that school work merits their time, effort, and emotional commitment. Problems with boredom, disengagement, classroom discipline, attendance, dropouts, walkouts and so on, are inevitable consequences of a dysfunctional curriculum.

15. Curricular emphasis on merely distributing information ("covering the material") has given rise to simplistic, superficial, destructive notions - instruction that confuses "harder" with "better," standards" that merely standardize, and machine-scored tests incapable of evaluating the quality of complex thought processes."