15 Curriculum: Planning, Assessment, and Instruction
15 Curriculum: Planning, Assessment, and Instruction
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Curriculum: Planning, Assessment, and Instruction
A substitute teacher was supposed to give an assessment while the classroom teacher was away, but one student refused to take the test. “He started yelling and walked out of the room, saying he wasn’t going to take this test that the teacher left for him. He kept saying that he is supposed to have questions read aloud to him, but that isn’t fair and I wasn’t going to do it!” Sometimes we think that fairness means everyone is treated the same way, but in reality, “fairness” involves meeting the needs of different students. In this example, the student had an IEP accommodation that allowed him to have tests read aloud to him. When considering planning, instruction, and assessment, sometimes treating all students the same is actually quite unfair, since students have different learning needs and strengths.
In this chapter, we will begin to explore the inner workings of classroom curriculum. Planning, assessment, and instruction all intertwine within a classroom curriculum, and being aware of the relationships among the various components of curriculum can lead to appropriate and fair assessments and instruction.
Chapter Outline
Types of Curriculum
You have had some kind of experience with schooling, whether it was homeschool, private school, public school, or some combination of those. No matter the setting where you learned, someone decided what you would learn. This is the curriculum. It reaches far beyond the textbooks that you might have used or the novels that you read. It even includes things that are unstated.
There are different kinds of curriculum, including the explicit curriculum, implicit curriculum, and null curriculum. Explicit curriculum is the state, district, and schools’ formal accounting of what they teach. Another term for explicit curriculum is formal curriculum. The explicit or formal curriculum is often laid out in standards or other curricular materials. Implicit curriculum,or informal curriculum, involves hidden messages that students learn from schooling that aren’t specifically in the standards and possibly aren’t even explicitly taught. For example, students may see bulletin board displays where people who look like them are missing and therefore feel like they do not belong in that classroom, or they may see the way the teacher treats students when it comes to conflict and realize the teacher displays favoritism towards certain students. Finally, null curriculum is made up of those things that are not taught in schools at all for a variety of reasons, such as contributions in science by scholars of color or women (Eisner, as cited in Milner, 2017). Finally, extra-curricular curriculum includes school-sponsored opportunities that fall outside of academic requirements prescribed on the local and state levels. Examples of extra-curricular activities include participation in sports, music, student governance, yearbook, s