Conceptualizing Curriculum in the Book

¶ … Conceptualizing Curriculum

In the book entitled Deciding What to Teach and Test: Designing, Aligning and Auditing the Curriculum, author and educator Fenwick W. English provides the readers with three step approach to re-conceptualizing curriculum. According to English, there are three approaches to curriculum: written curriculum, taught curriculum and tested curriculum. The written curriculum includes the published curriculum guides, state standards and textbooks. The taught curriculum includes the instruction and day-to-day teaching and the tested curriculum includes standardized tests and other, teacher made tests. According to English, "These three curricula deal with content and express the absolute possibility that there could be in schools three unrelated contents floating around, unconnected to one another." In other words, English is arguing that without alignment, schools essentially have three, often contradictory and sometimes even competing, curriculums.

English argues that the starting point for all curriculum re-conceptualization is to audit the use of the three curriculum in a particular school and then work to align them together.

A starting point in the alignment process is to decide what the purpose of the test will be. As all students will have to be evaluated in some form, the written and taught curriculums must be designed to meet the assessment goals. However, this alignment is not possible until the various curriculums are identified and understood. This is done by conducting a curriculum audit.

The purpose of a curriculum audit is to evaluate one's overall curriculum structure, or, in most cases, structures. The audit focuses on whether or not a particular school's curriculum is properly aligned, or equalized/coordinated between the written, taught and tested curriculums. The goal is to identify areas for improvement in terms of bringing these three curriculums together into one, coordinated school curriculum.

Currently, my school does not have the necessary conditions needed to engage in a valid curriculum audit. My school uses a charter-school, expeditionary learning approach to its curriculum development. Although in the long run, this approach will bring all the curriculums together, at the present moment the school is caught between the expeditionary learning curriculum and the curriculum mandates given by the local district and federal government. Thus, a curriculum audit will only reveal the obvious: that there are competing and contradictory curriculums occurring at the school. Unfortunately, at least at this point, a curriculum audit will not do any good as state and federal mandates are controlling.

In general, I agree with the assumptions presented by F.W. English. In today's standardized test-driven school environment, the testing curriculum is driving the written and taught curriculum. Although this results in a form of alignment, it is not the alignment that English has in mind. English does not argue that school's should bring their curriculums into one single curriculum (such as testing), but align the three curriculums so that they work together at achieving the school's educational goals.