Chapter 5

Richards, J. 2001. Planning goals and learning outcomes. In Curriculum development and language teaching. New York: Cambridge University Press. 112-142.

Chapter 5:

This chapter focused on planning learning outcomes of the curriculum one would design. Five major ideologies should be taken into account when planning the learning goals or outcomes. The participants in the curriculum planning process can use these ideologies to help them define what they want to accomplish with the curriculum as well as how they intend to accomplish those goals or aims. Another major component to curriculum planning is to be able to state and describe the goals or outcomes of the planed curriculum.

When reading about the ideologies of curriculum planning I though much about the curriculum that we have in place in our district and in our school and tried to identify which ideologies were present in our curriculums. What I found is that it really was difficult for me to pinpoint only one ideology driving our curriculum. Instead, what I found is that our curriculum is a motley mix of many ideologies. Can a curriculum that incorporates too many ideologies be dangerous? It seems that everyone who planned the curriculum would have a different idea as to what the purpose of that curriculum would be and it seems like that would cause problems amongst the various planners.

In reading this chapter I connected some of the material to the SIOP model. Most similar was the material regarding the creation of language and non-language objectives and being able to state those objectives in the curriculum planning process. Too often curriculums are designed and implemented in schools and only the language objectives (reading, writing, speaking, etc) are focused on. I strongly feel that although those objectives are necessary and valuable there is a whole other skill set that many teachers may not be giving the students. What that results in is a mass of people who can read, write, respond, etc but who lack the skills to be flexible enough to apply those skills to a job or to other situations in their lives outside of school. The goals of a curriculum should be to give students the most well rounded education possible and often the real world skill set is left out of core class curriculums.