“Approaches to Curriculum Design” Chapter 9

INTRODUCTION The design of a entirely new course may start from nothing except the knowledge of the curriculum designer. “After working through this chapter you should be able to decide on a starting point for curriculum design, and a way of covering the steps.” Language curriculum design / I.S.P. Nation and John Macalister. The main objective of a curriculum design is to work as a guide full of objectives that were created based on the necessities of an specific population. The process must include the start point and what kind of path to follow through the process. By following some ideas the author mentions on the book, my personal opinion would be developed in the next chapter by way of a reaction essay. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK The main purpose of this approach to a curriculum design is to describe those parts and the steps involved so every piece of curriculum design no matter how small is, should be considered. It is obvious that, any designer of a curriculum won´t be able to predict the behavior of a population, nevertheless by having an example of any other similar place, would be able to consider the same aspects in order to have a better approach. As well teachers cannot anticipate whom his /her student´s would be or even how they would act. In view of that, it is important to take into consideration the environment, needs, principles, content, format and the evaluation; those are the key facts in order to have a very well prepared curriculum design. I consider, it would be acceptable to look for someone else´s curriculum design, to have an idea but, bearing in mind that student´s are different and even more populations. Thus, choosing to copycat a design would be definitely a bad idea. Finally, there are many models or different approaches like the necessity model or the opportunistic one. No matter what model is chose, the most important is that any model must include supporting material for teachers and students. CONCLUSION As a conclusion, whatever approach is chosen, the benefit of following an organized approach, involving all the parts of a model, is that, parts of the process won´t be missed out. Poor curriculum design misses important parts and does not deal with parts in an honorable way. It is important to make sure that the various parts of the curriculum design processes are given proper consideration at some point in the curriculum design activity.