SUMMARY
This article is about how to design a document of curriculum that will attain sufficient clarity and specificity so that the instructed by a curriculum guide know exactly what they are being advised to do, an easy guide to consult, attractive, and helpful to be more user-friendly, to allow for the variety of settings, personalities and circumstances for which the guide is intended, and also to maintain the widest possible acceptability so that a guide’s proposals, prescriptions, recommendations, and suggestions will be followed in a school or community. As there was very little research-based knowledge available about how to design such documents yet there are few important questions, this research is conducted to answer those questions. The common argument is more attention should be given to the intentions of, and the practical problems faced by, individual teachers in the implementation process. There are many factors that can influence a teacher actual use of curriculum documents which are the development of a clear and validated materials, active administrative support and leadership at the district and especially at the school level, focused, ongoing in-service or staff-development activities, the development of collegiality and other interaction-based conditions at the school level and the selective use of external resources (both people and material). But in this paper, it focuses only on the curriculum materials. By using an analysis of implantation problems in primary science education, the researcher tries to clarify how a careful design of curriculum materials can improve the implementation process and the outcomes.
The implementation of this curriculum was done the Dutch National Institute for Curriculum Development and the context is a curriculum development project for primary science. The activities were carried out in an intensive interaction between curriculum developers and teachers. The implementation problems as identified by the teachers can be summarize as great difficulty in changing the teacher role, especially in regard to the forms of inquiry learning, a lack of background knowledge and confidence in subject matter and skills, lesson preparation as a complex and time-consuming chore, and an unclear view on, an little realization of, learning effects with the pupils. The already available lesson material were said to be very imaginative and attractive by both teachers and other experts in science education, however short on detailed directions for teacher actions. However, the new role is an unfamiliar one.
COMMENTS
From this research I have identified few advantages and flaws for both the old curriculum and the revised curriculum. Firstly, I will start with the old curriculum. There are a few pros in the old curriculum which the first one is it offers the teachers more option to do their preferred activities during teaching following their own style of teaching. Through this, the teacher can always be flexible and cater to the students’ need anytime without any restrain. Secondly, the old curriculum requires teachers to spend lesser time on doing their lesson preparation. This can spare the teacher more time on doing something else such as looking for teaching materials and attending more important meetings with other teachers. Thirdly, in addition to spending lesser time, old curriculum requires lesser energy and effort in teaching. Teacher’s mood and emotion in class is usually influenced by the outside classroom work given by the administration and higher officers. Less work outside classroom will contribute to more energetic and aggressive teaching in class by the teacher. Fourthly, old curriculum allows teachers to have wide imagination and to be imaginative in their lesson thus creating a more lively class and develop effective teaching. In contrast, there are few flaws in the old curriculum which the first one is it lacks of effectiveness quality in its implementation. It was reported that students continuously have problems regarding the subject matter taught in class. The second flaw is that the teacher has no specific guidelines which can drive them to repeating the same topic and worse come to worst, the tendency of a subject to be left out from the teaching. The third flaw is that, as much more time was spent on logistical aspects such as the material collections, lesser time left for lesson preparation and revision before class.
On the other hand, the next comment is on the revised curriculum which is more detailed and specific in the advice and directions which appear to help and guide the teacher during the teaching to make the teaching become more effective. It was proven during the experiment that the experimented samples shows mean of 78.77 compared to control group that only has 44.65. The elaborated guideline that tells how-to-do everything makes the experimented teachers to be more successful in creating and maintaining the intended approach throughout lesson. This is where the controlled teacher always makes mistakes of unable to maintain the approach that they intend to use because of unorganized lesson preparation. The best thing about the revised curriculum is that the lesson will be in much more accordance with the intention of the developers or the lesson planner themselves. Lesson preparation was also proven to be improvised by the revised curriculum. Teachers are now oriented themselves much more to the subject matter content and the didactic process of the lesson which avoid the losing grip of the controlled teacher when their student unable to understand the subject matter. Spending more time on preparing the subject matter seems to be a lot more important than spending time on logistical aspects.
Yet still, there are few cons in this revised curriculum. The first one is that the curriculum guide shows too much thus creating a lot of restrictions and restrain to the teacher who are going to make the lesson preparation. This is denying the teachers to their concept of being flexible. The second one is the revised curriculum gives no room for imagination and creativity which defies the purpose of having a fun and homey classroom and turns it into a military style of study. The third one is also contributing to the same effect which is teachers have to spend a lot more time in doing the lesson planning. It is true that lesson planning is the key for effective teaching but giving a space for imagination, freedom and spontaneity can never affected too much and it is important that the student and the teacher to feel like studying in freedom and no stress. In Malaysia itself, we also have this tight style of curriculum which denies us the freedom of teaching and we have to spend a lot of time in preparing the lesson plan that we have to spare few hours for only one hour period for every class that we will have. In addition to this, the revised curriculum tends to be unfamiliar because the teachers did not involve in the development process. It takes time to be implemented effectively and this can cause the students to be confused during the time-taking.
CONCLUSION
The revised curriculum should be facilitated during its implementation to make it effective and going smoothly without any problem as the supervisor teacher who facilitates the implementation should be able to have every solution ready before it is ever implemented.
RECOMMMEDATION
I recommend that the revised curriculum to be simpler than it is now but to be in more particular details than the existed ones. It is good to have a guideline that considers the quality of flexibility, spontaneity, freedom in teaching but still in the accordance with the syllabus.
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