PLANNING GOALS AND LEARNING OUTCOMES

PLANNING GOALS AND LEARNING OUTCOMES

Submitted to fulfill one of the requirements of Curriculum and Material Development

Lecturer: Yayan Suryana, Drs. M.Pd.

Written by :

Ditha Febrivania (III B)

NPM. 108060053

ENGLISH EDUCATIONAL DEPARTMENT

TEACHING AND EDUCATIONAL SCIENCES FACULTY

SWADAYA GUNUNG JATI UNIVERSITY

2011

Several key assumptions about goals characterize the curriculum approach to educatioanal planning. These can be summarized as follows:

· People are generally motivated to pursue specifics goals.

· The use of goals in teaching improves the effectiveness of teaching and learning.

· A program will be effective to the extent that its goals are sound and clearly described.

The Ideology of the curriculum

In developing goals for educational programs, curriculum planners draw on their understanding both of the present and long-term needs of learners and of society as well as the planners’ beliefs and ideologies about schools, learners, and teachers. These beliefs and values provide the philosophical underpinnings for educational programs and the justification for the kinds of aims they contain. At any given time, however, a number of competing or complementary perspectives are available concerning the focus of the curriculum.

Academic rationalism

Academic rationalism is sometimes used to justify the inclusion of certain foreign languages in school curricula, where they are taught not as tools for communication but as an aspect of social studies.

This ideology is also sometimes used as justification for including courses on literature, or American or British culture, in a language program.

Clark (1987, 6) points out that in the United Kingdom academic rationalism is concerned with:

· The maintenance and transmission through education of the wisdom and culture of previous generations. This has led to the creation of a two-tier system of education-one to accord with the “higher” cultural traditions of an elite, and the other to cater for the more concrete and practical lifestyles of the messes.

· The development for the elite of generalizable intellectual capacities and critical faculties.

· The maintenance of stands through an inspectorate and external examination boards controlled by the universities.

Social and Economic efficiency

Socioeconomic ideology stresses the economic needs of society as a justification for the teaching of English. Successful economies in the twenty-first century are increasingly knowledge-based, and the bulk of the world’s knowledge is in the English language. In a recent debate over standards of English in Japan, poor standards of English were cited as one reason for Japan’s economic malaise in the late 1990s.

Learner-centeredness

Constructivists emphasize that learning involves active construction and testing of one’s own representation of the world and accommodation of it to one conceptual framework.

Social reconstructionism

This curriculum emphasizes the roles of schools and learners can and should play addressing social injustices and inequality. Curriculum development is not seen as a neutral process.

The most persuasive and currently popular representatives of this view-point are associated with the movement known as critical theory and critical pedagogy.

Cultural pluralism

Cultural pluralism seeks to redress racism, to raise the self-esteem of minority groups, and to help children appreciate the viewpoints of other cultures and religions.

Stating curriculum outcomes

Aims

The purposes of aim statements are:

· To provide a clear definition of the purposes of a program

· To provide guidelines for teachers, learners, and materials writers

· To help provide a focus for instruction

· To describe important and realizable change in learning

Objectives

Aims are very general statements of the goals of a program. They can be interpreted in many different ways.

Objectives generally have the following characteristics:

· They describe what the aim seeks to achieve in terms of smaller units of learning.

· They provide a basis for the organization of teaching activities.

· They describe earning in terms of observable behavior or performance.

The advantages of describing the aims of a course in terms of objectives are:

· They facilities planning, once objectives have been agreed on, course planning, materials preparation, textbook selection, and related processes can begin.

· They provide measurable outcomes and thus provide accountability; given a set of objectives, the success or failure of program to teach the objectives can be measured.

· They are perspective; they describe how planning should proceed and do away with subjective interpretations and personal opinions.

Criticisms of the use of the objectives

The major criticisms of their use are:

Objectives turn teaching into a technology

Objectives trivialize teaching and are product-oriented

Objectives are unsuited to many aspects of language uses

The English Language Syllabus for the Teaching of English at Primary Level (1991) in Singapore includes a number of categories of process objectives. These are described as follows:

1. Thinking skills

2. Learning how to learn

3. Language and culture