Conceptualizing Curriculum in His Book

¶ … Conceptualizing Curriculum

In his book entitled Deciding What to Teach and Test: Designing, Aligning and Auditing the Curriculum, author and educator Fenwick W. English provides the readers with a quick and easy to read outline of the various approaches to curriculum and answers the questions on what these curriculums are suppose to accomplish. In the book, English discusses issues of front loading, back loading and using alignment within school curriculums. He also shows how each of these approaches are effected by schools that "teach to the test." Further, English discusses the effect teaching to the test has had on the nation's schools.

The key issue in all curriculum design is to first decide the role that test, especially standardized test, will play. As all students must be evaluated in some form, whether it is unit test or college entrance examinations or the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, the curriculum must generally be designed in a manner that will allow students to succeed. However, this becomes an issue as standardized test play more and more of a controlling part in school funding and success. What this creates is the trend of "teaching to the test." Teaching to the test occurs when the emphasis of all classroom work is on preparing the student to succeed on the actual test over anything else. The benefit of this approach is that students do succeed on the test. The negative side, however, is that much of the educational experience is simply lost because it is not tested. For example, learning how something applies in the real world will not be taught simply because it will not be tested.

In light of the role that teaching to the test has, there are three primary curriculum approaches that are used: front loading, back loading and alignment. Front loading is a curriculum approach that writes the curriculum first and then writes the test. The benefits of this method is that the curriculum remains localized and is easily customized. However, this method requires more responsibility from more people. On the other hand is back loading, where the test is written to the curriculum. The advantage of this is that the test is already picked, the teacher knows what needs to be taught and, in a way, it simulates real life, such as when an adult applies for a professional license, they first must take a standardized test. Alignment, in the curriculum sense, is the relationship between the test and the written curriculum. The goal of curriculum alignment is to find a happy-medium between back loading and front loading, or a system where the curriculum and the test are lined up and compliment each other because they are developed together.

Currently, my school is in the process of alignment. Currently, according to the school board, alignment has been successfully accomplished in the fields of social studies and science from throughout the K. To 12 system. However, prior to this alignment, and currently in all other subject fields, the school is back loading. The primary reason for this is that my school caters to a low-income population and, due to the new No Child Left Behind provisions, must perform well on the exams in order to stay licensed. Thus, in reaction to this, the curriculum was changed in order to meet the demands of the pre-designed test. Now, for example, English classes are devoted to such areas as vocabulary and reading comprehension opposed to creative writing or literary interpretation. This fact to shows that my school, out of necessity, tends to teach to the test. Further, this shows the need for the alignment process to continue, so that there is a better balance between the classroom work and the testing.