The Elements of Curriculum
The Elements of Curriculum
Narrow vs broad
- Narrow: content and examination only.
- Broad: a blend of many elements around the whole learning environment.
The broad blend of elements
- Educational strategies.
- Course content.
- Learning outcomes.
- Educational experiences.
- Assessment.
- Educational environment.
- The learner’s own learning style.
- Personal timetable and program of work.
Key elements and their relationships
- Staff and learners sit at the heart.
- Relationships are shaped by content, assessment, learning experiences, and the links among them.
Elements are the parts a curriculum is made of. The word is sometimes swapped for factors or components, but the meaning is the same: the pieces that, put together, form a curriculum. How many pieces you count depends on how narrowly or broadly you define curriculum in the first place.
The narrow list and the broad blend
On the narrow view, a curriculum has just two elements: content and examination. You decide what to teach and you decide how to test it. This is the traditional pairing, named by Harden and Stamper in 1999, and for a long time it was all most people meant by the elements of a curriculum.
The broad view sees a curriculum as a sophisticated blend of many more elements. Garcia-Barbero argued in 1995 that quality comes not from any single element but from the right mix of them, balanced to make learning efficient. On this view the elements are:
- Educational strategies: the overall approach, such as teaching by project, by theme, or by topic.
- Course content: what is taught and the basis on which it was chosen.
- Learning outcomes: whether the aim is basic knowledge, or also analysis and explanation.
- Educational experiences: the classroom experiences offered, from lectures to group work.
- Assessment: how learning is checked, by written test or by continuous observation.
- Educational environment: the whole setting in which learning happens.
- The learner’s own learning style: the fact that learners in one room do not all learn the same way.
- Personal timetable and program of work: when and how a learner works best, including attention span.
| View | Elements counted |
|---|---|
| Narrow (Harden and Stamper, 1999) | Content and examination |
| Broad (Garcia-Barbero, 1995) | Strategies, content, outcomes, experiences, assessment, environment, learning style, program of work |
Content and examination
This traditional pairing, named by Harden and Stamper in 1999, decides what to teach and how to test it. The broad view adds strategies, outcomes, experiences, environment, and more.
Key elements and their relationships
Listing the elements is not enough; what matters is how they connect. At the heart of any curriculum sit staff and learners. Everything else is shaped by the relationship between them.
That relationship is, in turn, shaped by the answers to a few key questions: questions about content, about assessment, and about the learning interactions and experiences that fill the time together. The final question is about the linkages, the way these elements connect to one another. A curriculum is not a pile of separate parts. It works only when content, assessment, and experience are linked so that each one supports the others.
This is why a strong curriculum has to be designed as a whole. A fine set of outcomes with a mismatched assessment, or rich experiences that no content supports, will not hold together. The links between the elements carry as much weight as the elements themselves.
A curriculum works only when the parts support each other
Content, assessment, and experiences must connect so each reinforces the rest. Strong elements that do not link, like outcomes with a mismatched test, will not hold together.
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