DESIGNING AND IMPLEMENTING CLASSROOM LESSONS CURRICULUM DESIGN
A. Curriculum Development: On Overview
In the center of the chart are
the basic steps normally followed in designing a curriculum. On each side are
influential interacting factors. Toward the top, note that as goals are being
defined and as syllabus is being conceptualized, institutional constraints and
available materials and resources must be simultaneously analyzed in order to maintain
feasibility. In the lower part of the flowchart, the training, experience, and
ability of the teacher will interact with the process of lesson design and
teaching the course itself. Then, as instruction is ongoing, formative
assessments will have the effect of monitoring students’ progress. Finally,
assessment of students, teacher, and program can fruitfully lead to appropriate
revision of the course.[1]
B. Situation Analysis
The
first or perhaps among the first steps in course design is an analysis of the
setting, the audience, and needs of the students, otherwise known as a
situation analysis (Richards,2001). Every effective course is undergirded by a
consideration of the following factors:
1. Educational setting. Within what societal
and cultural norms are the course situated? What is the institutional framework
into which the course must be integrated? What are broad instructional goals of
the program? In general what is the structure of the program? What are the
physical conditions (e.g., learners, in very general terms? Basic questions
here look at the larger educational context within which a course is placed.[2]
2. Class characteristic. How would you
describe the class in term of the homogeneity of learners, the size of the
class, and its relationship to others that learners are taking?
3. Faculty characteristic. What are the
qualifications of teachers training, experience, and methodological biases?
What are the workings conditions (hours of teaching, support services) for the
faculty? To what extent is there collaboration among teachers?
4. Governance of course content. Who
determines course content? To what extent can teacher choose content and/or
adapt content as they perceive the need to do so?
5. Assessment and evaluation requirement. What
stipulations are in force for assessing students for placement, diagnostic, or
achievement purpose? What grading norms are in place? How, if at all are
courses evaluated and revised?[3]
C. Needs Analysis
Richards (2001) is quick to point out that needs in not an easy concept
to define. Depending on whom you ask, they are “wants, desires, demand,
expectations, motivations, lacks, constraints, and requirements” (p.54). a
needs assessment is an important precursor to designing the goals of a course
in that it can identify the overall purpose of the course, “gaps” that the
course is intended to fill, and the opinions of both course designers and
learners about their reasons for designing/ taking the course. As such, it is
important to identify at least two types of needs: objective and subjective.
Objective needs are those that can be relative easily measured, quantified, or
specified with agreement by administrators (and possibly teachers) on what
constitutes defined need. Information gathered will include:
·
Demographic data on learners, including language
ability, interests, etc.
·
Needs expressed in terms of proficiency levels.
·
Language skills to be addressed.
·
What learners need to do in English (target context
for English use).[4]
Subjective needs are of equal or greater important as they focus on
needs as seen through the eyes of the learners themselves. From these
procedures, the following information may emerge:
·
Learners’ attitudes toward the target language and
culture
·
Expectations that students have of themselves and of
the course.
·
Purpose that students perceive for studying English
·
Specific language skills that students wish to focus
on
·
Preferences (styles, strategies) that students have
about their learning
D. Problematizing
Graves (1996,p.5) suggests that an important feature of course design is
the careful consideration of the potentially larger number of things that can
go “wrong” with one’s best-laid plans for a course. Problematizing a course,
that is, anticipating impediments, issues, and other potential obstacles in
advance, will save untold hours of effort that may otherwise be spent “patching
up” the shortcoming later on. Recently one of my graduate students proposed to
design a workplace curriculum for grocery store workers for whom English was a
second language, and who were having difficulties communicating with customers,
colleagues, and bosses.
E. Specifying Goals
The
terms goal and objective are often interchanged in pedagogical literature, and
depending on whom you consult, you might find some confusion in defining the
two terms. For the sake of clarity and brevity here, I will offer a distinction
that seems to conform to the majority of uses of the two terms. It is really
quite a simple distinction. Goals are rather broadly based aims and purpose in
an educational context, and are therefore more appropriately associated with
whole programs courses, or perhaps sizable modules within a course. Objective
are much more specific that goals, both on their conception and in their
context. Objectives usually refer to aims and purpose within the narrow context
of a lesson or an activity within a lesson. By the end of the course, students
will be able to:
1. Participate in social conversations in
English
2. Speak with few hesitations and with only
minor (local) errors
3. Successfully apply some from-focused
instruction to their speech
4. Self-monitor their speech for potential
errors
5. Participate comfortably in pair, group, and
whole-class discussions
6. Give a simple oral presentation on a
familiar topic
These served as guidelines for determining course
content and eventually lesson objective.
F.
Conceptualizing a Course Syllabus
The next two steps in many cases will be undertaken simultaneously or at
least interactively: As you put together what most institutions call a syllabus
(a sequential list of objective, topic, situations, skills, and forms to be
taught), it is often helpful to carry out a review of options in materials (
textbooks and other resources) that are already available. A communicative
syllabus (function-focused as opposed to form-focused) should minimally consist
of:
1. Goals for the course (and possibly goals
for modules within the course).
2. Suggested objectives for units and possibly
for lessons.
3. A sequential list of functions (purpose),
following from the goals that the curriculum will fulfill. Such a list is
typically organized into weeks or days.
4. A sequential list of topical and situations
matched to the functions in #3.
5. A sequential list of grammatical, lexical,
and/or phonological form to be taught, again matched to the sequence of functions.
6. A sequential list of skills (listening,
speaking, reading, writing) that are also matched to the above sequences.
7. Matched
references throughout to textbook units, lessons, and/or pages, and addtional
resources (audio, visual, workbooks, etc) to be used.
8. Possible
suggestions of assessment alternatives, including criteria to be tested and
genres of assessment (traditional tests, journals, portofolios, etc).
G. Selecting Textbooks, Materials, and
Resources
As noted above, the process of reviewing
potential textbook, materials, and recourses, beyond those that you might
design yourself, is one that ideally takes place in concert with
conceptualizing the syllabus. . Richards (2001, p.258), citing Cunningsworth
(1995), suggests the following criteria as a set of guidelines:
1. They should correspond to learner’s needs.
They should match the aims and objective of the language program.
2. They should reflect the uses (present of
future) that learners will make of the language. Textbooks should be chosen
that will help equip students to use language effectively for their own
purpose.
3. They should take account of students’ needs
as learners and should facilitate their learning processes, without
dogmatically imposing a rigid “method”.
4. They should have a clear role as a support
for learning. Like teachers, they should mediate between the target language
and the learner.
H. Assessment
Assessment of the students’ attainment of objectives of lessons and
units, and of the goals of the curriculum, may be offered in a wide array of
possible formats. Traditional periodic tests such as quizzes, multiple-choice
tests, fill-in-the-blank tests, and other somewhat mechanical test types offer
the possibility of a practical, quick level check of students’ attainment.
Midterm and final examinations might include, along with some of the above
techniques, short essay, oral production, and more open-ended responses.
Alternatives in such assessment techniques are available in journals, portfolios,
conferences, observations, interviews, and self and peer-evaluation. Details on
all these possibilities are described in Chapter 23, 24, and 25 of this book.
I.
Program Evaluation
No curriculum should be considered complete without
some form of program evaluation which you will see toward the bottom of the
chart in figure 9.1 two manifestations of program itself. A third way to view
program evolution is to consider various aspects of the program, any or all of
which might have contributed to the success or failure of a course:
·
Appropriateness of the course goals (in meeting needs
and purposes)
·
Adequacy of the syllabus to meet those goals
·
Textbooks and material used to support the curriculum
·
Classroom methodology, activities, procedures
·
The teacher’s training, background, and expertise
·
Appropriate orientation of teachers and students
before the course
·
The students’ motivation and attitudes
·
The students’ perceptions of the course
·
The students’ actual performance as measured by
assessments
·
Means for monitoring students’ progress though
assessment
·
Institutional support, including resources,
classrooms, and environment[5]
REFERENCES
H. Douglas Brown.(2007). Teaching
by Principles An Interactive Approach to
Language Pedagogy (3rd Edition). New York:Pearson Longman.
Alberta Education. (2013). Curriculum
redesign. Retrieved from http://education.alberta.ca/topicsearch/?searchQuery=curriculum-redesign
[1] H. Douglas Brown.(2007).
Teaching by Principles An Interactive
Approach to Language Pedagogy (3rd Edition).
New York:Pearson Longman
[2]Http://sites.nd.edu/kaneb/2014/11/03/Designing-and-Implementing-Classroom-Lessons Curriculum-Design /On 28/10/2018.
[3]Https://extension.ucsd.edu/courses-and-programs/designing-and-implementing-classroom-lessons/On28/10/2018.
[5] H. Douglas Brown.(2007). Teaching by Principles An Interactive
Approach to Language Pedagogy (3rd
Edition). New York:Pearson Longman.
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