Curriculum Continuted....

Last week, I introduced the Saylor, Alexander, Lewis (SAL) model of curriculum. Its components include goals or objectives, creation or design, implementation activities, and assessment techniques. This week’s blog will focus on the first component – objectives.

The objective component is the stated goals of the unit. These usually come in the form of educational standards developed by a school district, state department of education, or the federal government. Essentially, at the end of the lesson, what is it that the students should know and be able to do? Typically objectives are written to complete some variation of this sentence…”Upon completion of this lesson, the students will be able to _____________.

Bloom’s Taxonomy is at the heart of all objectives. Bloom established three learning domains: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor. Cognitive is knowledge, affective is attitude, and psychomotor is skills. The cognitive area will be the focus of this blog. In the cognitive domain, there are six categories of learning that are set up in a hierarchy: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. Action verbs that begin written objectives in a curriculum establish the level of thinking required to complete the action and therefore allow curriculum to be given a difficulty rating. Curriculum that focuses on Synthesis and Evaluation requires higher levels of thinking than a curriculum written to teach Knowledge and Comprehension. A good curriculum should include a variety of Bloom’s verbs. In fact, a curriculum should start at the lower levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy and build upon itself to the higher levels of thinking. A common problem with curriculum however is that students are never required to move to higher level thinking. Memorization and regurgitation of facts and information is all too common in a weak curriculum. Action verbs such as restate, define, and list are found in objectives when instead the verbs should be create, analyze, assess, and evaluate. These higher level thinking skills will help the student learn the content past the point of simply recalling information. Instead, they will be able to utilize learned information in the real world.

Stay tuned for next week’s blog on the second component of the SAL curriculum model – design.