The Teacher and The School Curriculum
Lesson 10: Curriculum Design Models
There are three main approaches, and each one has its own unique factors and focus.
Subject-Centered Approaches
This is the traditional approach where the focus is squarely on the content itself. Think of it as putting the material first and organizing everything around what needs to be taught. Here are the different variations:
- Subject Design - this approach puts all its energy into the content. While this ensures students learn specific material thoroughly, it can sometimes forget that students are real people with their own interests, natural talents, and personal experiences. The big problem here is that learning can become siloed, where each subject exists in its own little bubble without connecting to other areas. For example, math stays in math class, and history stays in history class, with no bridges between them.
- Discipline Design - this takes things a step further than basic subject design. Instead of just teaching facts, it focuses on the specific knowledge and methods that experts in each field actually use. So you're not just learning history, you're learning how historians think and research. This approach is especially helpful for older students who are starting to figure out what they want to do with their lives and are moving toward a specific career or field of study.
- Correlation Design - this is like building bridges between islands. It starts with a central theme or topic (the core), and then creates connections between different subjects to reduce the choppy, disconnected feeling students often get when subjects are kept completely separate. The beauty here is that subjects relate to each other while still keeping their own identity. So you might study the 1920s in history while reading literature from that same period, making both subjects richer and more meaningful.
- Broadfield - this approach tries to break down the walls between subjects entirely. Instead of teaching separate subjects that might be related, it intentionally combines and integrates content that naturally goes together. The goal is to help students see the bigger picture and understand how different areas of knowledge connect and support each other in real life.
Learner-Centered Approaches
Now we shift instead of asking "What content do we need to cover?", this approach asks "What do our students need?" The learner becomes the center of learning.
- Child-Centered Design - this one is pretty much what it sounds like. It's built around what children actually need and what interests them. Instead of forcing kids into a predetermined mold, it recognizes that they're unique individuals with their own curiosities and ways of learning. The curriculum adapts to the child, not the other way around.
- Experience-Centered Design - here's where things get really personal. This approach says that the best starting point for any curriculum is what learners have actually experienced in their own lives. Their stories, their backgrounds, their daily realities become the foundation for learning. It's about making education relevant by connecting it directly to what students already know and have lived through.
- Humanistic Design - this approach has a beautiful philosophy at its heart: the whole point of education is to help people develop themselves as human beings. It's not about filling students with facts or training them for jobs. It's about helping each person grow, discover who they are, and reach their full potential as a complete person.
Problem-Centered Approaches
The third major approach says that the best way to learn is by wrestling with real challenges and issues. Instead of abstract lessons, students dive into actual problems.
- Life-Situation Design - this gets super practical. It uses the immediate problems happening in society right now and the actual concerns that students are dealing with in their daily lives. If there's a local environmental issue, you learn science through that. If there's a community challenge, you learn social studies through addressing it. Education becomes tied to real life, not textbook examples.
- Core Problem Design - this focuses on general education by centering everything around common human activities and problems that everyone faces. These are the universal challenges we all encounter, the things that connect us as humans regardless of our backgrounds. For example "How can we make sure everyone has enough healthy food to eat?" Then student may answer in the perspective of science by preserving trees, and the other student in the POV of math might say by calculating calories intake.
By studying these shared problems, students get a well-rounded education that prepares them for real life. Each of these approaches has its strengths, and many schools actually mix and match elements from different models to create a curriculum that works best for their students and community. The key is understanding what each approach prioritizes and how it shapes the learning experience.
Curriculum Design Models Quiz: click here
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