1+Introduction+page

Rough draft of the "relationship of curriculum and instruction." - Please feel free to add comments or edit on this page or in discussion area.

Introduction Curriculum is related to instruction through the use of Understanding by Design (UBD), a mutual need for collaboration during design, and common roots grounded in standards. UBD is the cohesive agent bonding curriculum or “what teachers teach” (Parkay, Hass, Anctil, p310) with instruction or “planning the how.” (Parkay, Hass, Anctil, p311) Both curriculum and instruction value collaboration. Curriculum values a collaborative approach during design. Curriculums is at its best when teachers, students, administrators, researchers, members of all cultures, business partners, and community members all have input to the design process. Instruction is at its best—and reaches the highest level of learning—when students are allowed to collaborate and interact through scaffolding, questioning, and peer-partnerships. Curriculum and instruction must both be solidly connected to standards. Neither can be independently driven forces, going off in random directions. Standards are the guiding force in developing curriculum that leads to appropriate, best-practices instruction. Finally, curriculum and instruction are connected in an unknown, “preferable” (Parkay, Hass, Anctil, p60) future. Adaptability and flexibility in problem solving are goals for the end of the process, but must also be elements contained in the process itself.

Curriculum has been defined in many different environments, for a wide-range of purposes. It has been defined for foundational or benchmark purposes as “state standards” (Marshall, p42) or specific, expected tasks. Other educators defined curriculum as “pedagogical approaches (Marshall, p43) or the latest trend in educational software. This spectrum of definitions highlights the difference in “purposes and educational settings within which we work” (Parkay, Hass, Anctil, p2), and the depth that curriculum brings to every aspect of the learning process. Schubert tried to simplify the definition as whatever “is worth knowing.” (Schubert, p20) The best approach, however, is to extract the essence of each and develop an all-encompassing definition. It should be a definition that comes closer to describing what Schubert called the “journey of learning, growing, and becoming.” (Schubert, p20) To that end, curriculum is defined as the bridge from where students are, to where they will need to be, travelling along a path guided by standards.

A destination marked on a map designates a journey’s end. Analyzing how to move along the journey’s path is an equally important process. In education, that process is called development of instruction. Instruction involves not only pedagogy, but using reflection, research, student needs, community input, and a vision of the journey’s end to determine which pedagogical elements would make the journey effective and affective. The development of instruction also recognizes that diversity in learners carries with it an intrinsic understanding that there must be diversity in the learning process.