Curriculum as Discrete Tasks and Concepts
Curriculum as Discrete Tasks and Concepts
Image 6: discrete tasks and concepts
- Curriculum is a set of tasks to be mastered.
- Each task leads to a specified, behavioural end.
- Borrowed from training in business, industry, and the military.
- Skills broken into constituent behaviours; knowledge into cognitive, affective, psychomotor, and social parts.
The sixth image comes from the world of job training. It breaks learning into small, checkable pieces, treating the curriculum as the ordered set of tasks a learner must work through.
Curriculum as tasks to be mastered
This image treats curriculum as a set of tasks to be mastered. Each task is assumed to lead to a specified end, and that end usually has a behavioural meaning: the learner can do a new task, or do an old one better than before. Learning is broken into pieces, and the curriculum is the ordered set of those pieces.
The approach was borrowed from the training programs of business, industry, and the military, where complex jobs are taught by breaking them into trainable steps. Just as a skill can be defined by the smaller behaviours that make it up, knowledge and appreciation can be analysed into the concepts that characterise them: cognitive, affective, psychomotor, and social. The curriculum becomes a map of these parts, each one a task to be checked off.
The strength here is clarity and trackability. The risk is that learning which does not break cleanly into tasks can get left out, and the bigger picture can dissolve into a pile of separate skills.
A set of tasks to be mastered, each leading to a specified end
Borrowed from job training, it breaks skills into constituent behaviours and breaks knowledge into cognitive, affective, psychomotor, and social parts. Each part is a task to check off.
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