16 Curriculum Innovations
“Curriculum holds an outstanding place when seeking to promote innovation in education, as it reflects the vision for education by indicating knowledge, skills, and values to be taught to students. It may express not only what should be taught to students, but also how the students should be taught.”-– Kiira Kärkkäinen
Introduction
Innovation means doing things in new ways, and in curriculum, it means adopting different designs for learning to help make learning more meaningful for 21st-century learners. Some practices in education have become outmoded, and learning experiences should be redesigned to be more relevant to student interests, abilities, and cultures. An additional challenge is that with a more diverse population of students who have a broad range of abilities, innovations must be linked to curriculum goals as well as being challenging and differentiated to provide for an array of learning experiences.
Essential Questions
- What are the three main models of curriculum innovation? How are they the same? How are they different?
- What are the most important change agents in a school?
- What are the STEM and STEAM initiatives?
- What are the implications regarding what has been learned about curriculum in the past ten years according to Sal Khan?
Curriculum Change
From Curriculum Studies, pp. 108-113
Curriculum change is inevitable in any society. These changes occur because there is not perfect curriculum, and there is most often a need to adjust to the economic, technological, social, political, and ideological needs in the society. Change can be perceived at three levels.
Minor changes involve re-arrangement of subject content, learning activities, re-organization of personnel, addition of topics or methods in the curriculum project.
Medium changes involve not only organizing of content, materials or facilities, but it involves integration of subjects or new approaches to the existing subjects. On the other hand;
Major change involves an overhaul of the existing curriculum. It may entail a complete re-organization of the conceptual design of the curriculum, changes in structure, content, methods and approaches.
Changes in resources and facilities can also lead to a totally new curriculum plan or program. For curriculum change to occur, there are certain agencies involved in the process. Let us examine some of them.
Agencies of Curriculum Change
Agencies of change include institutes of education, curriculum development centers, research institutes, schools, colleges, universities, departments of education, publishing companies, school districts, school boards, and communities.
Curriculum Innovations
Innovation involves the introduction of something new in curriculum that deviates from the standard practice, often because society has changed and so must the curriculum. To meet these changes, innovations are created.
An innovation must fit in with the goals and objectives of education which usually reflect the