Curriculum Planning Fall 2000 The Curriculum Planning class I'm taking in the Fall of 2000 is a really interesting class. It's held on every other Saturday from 8:30am until 1:30pm, and the professor is my advisor, Dr. Mark Schug. A brief overview of what the class is about: *defining curriculum, *current conditions of education, *an overview of education reforms, *models for curriculum development, *administration of school curriculum, *developing curriculum, *models for curriculum writing, *barriers to curriculum, *evaluating curriculum, *going deeper into reforms (choice, charter schools, DI, constructivism, standards, etc). Now, obviously teachers are the only ones who are going to find this area interesting! Dr. Schug has brought up some very interesting points, one of which has caught my attention so much that I'm considering changing my concentration for my master's degree! Traditionalism v. Progressivism There are three assignments, plus a final exam. One of the assingments was to research four articles and write critiques on them, based mostly on the traditional v. progressive stances. We then presented one of the articles in class and handed a copy of that article out -- therefore, we all received 30+ articles to skim through. It was a very interesting exercise in the different types of research that is "out there" in education. The major assignment is pretty open-ended. It's either (1)a series of lesson plans, (2) a 10 page paper, or (3) a combination paper and lesson plans. My interest was piqued by the progressive/traditional stances as described above, and I've been trying to think of a way to put it into a paper that was more than simply organizing information already out there. It is my opinion that teachers, for the most part, don't really fall into one or the other category, but are actually a mixture, middle-of-the-road of the two. My paper is going to compare the two extremes, and propose a way to pull surveys to prove (or disprove!) my point. I'll repost it here once it's done! Return home Email me! This page hosted by Geocities