Curriculum Alignment
How do you start aCurriculum Alignment research paper? Our expert writers suggest like this:
For a research paper on curriculum alignment, you may want to discuss how you would involve all stakeholders in the process of curriculum alignment no matter where the instruction may take place (K-12 schools, corporate, or higher education). The following are the areas of interest to consider when aligning curriculum properly in contemporary American education:
- teachers
- classroom procedures
- principals
- administrators
- parent involvement
- public officials
- community leaders
- learning styles
- unions
Discuss how the input from various stakeholders can result in better curriculum development and instruction. When writing your research paper on curriculum alignment, remember to keep your answer focused on the product and process of alignment.
Curriculum Alignment and Community
In regards to curriculum alignment, first explain the emphasis is on community support for designing a curriculum. How do you get parents and other stakeholders to support and give feedback about the school's curriculum. This could include offering assistance with actual teaching activities. However, the main part here would be to keep parents informed and constantly ask for their input which includes feedback and recommendations. So, your paper needs to include specific activities that gather, include or inform parents and other stakeholders about the school's curriculum and its curriculum alignment needs.
Among the general responsibilities of a school leader are to provide a welcoming and comfortable physical environment in which students, teachers and community members are at ease, and providing all parents with clear, practical and accurate information on how to help children succeed and the progress they are making towards success in implementing the curriculum. To this end I suggest a Welcoming Schools program which would implement consistent efforts to make our school inviting. Johnson & Ulinne (2005) offer such easy suggestions as proving coffee and benches for parents, and an easy system for reporting both positive and negative reports. Everyone should feel not only welcomed, but respected and valued at the school. This is the first step on the path towards developing and sustaining meaningful, effectual, long term relationships is to set the stage and tone under which those relationships develop.
A specific program which has proven effective in growing home/school relationships is a home visit program. Properly implemented, home visit programs increase parental involvement and in doing so raising achievement. They also promote a strong community, allowing everyone to help set priorities and work towards established common goals.
Classroom Procedures and Curriculum
Classroom procedures are required to provide a safe, orderly environment which is conducive to learning; such a positive school climate significantly impacts academic achievement. A positive school climate is one that promotes caring and makes children feel accepted. Such an environment presumes that student conduct will be manageable. The rationale behind school based intervention programs implemented in the school environment is to reduce disruptive behaviors which interfere with classroom management, for example behaviors such as not following school rules, arriving late or unprepared for class, talking back to the teacher or engaging in aggressive/violent acts. The proverbial gap between research and practice in education indicates that effective programs are available to prevent and manage disruptive behavior. The programs, once identified, could be successfully adapted to other settings.
It is evident that the educators that work in schools often view curriculum alignment as a formal structure of information and data that had to be provided to students each year. Take the example of a high school in a rural area that does not update it's curriculum. Because the community served by the school may be rural and thus very conservative and closed minded, a curriculum may have been set many years ago and never changed. A curriculum may never change to the point that instructors that have been in the system for more than 5 years literally teach the same information, year after year. Therefore, social behaviorist ideologies should serve as the basis for informing curriculum. Schools need to examine their curriculum every few years-if not every year-to make sure that the content and information provided to students is both relevant and appropriate given what has been learned about education in recent years. For instance, I made the argument earlier that the curriculum at a rural high school forged in 1950 was never changed. When Howard Gardner introduced his ideas on multiple intelligences in the late 1980s, schools should have considered this paradigm in the development and establishment of their curriculum. Taking this paradigm into consideration would have given both students and educators new methods for looking at how content is provided to students in the school setting.
Considering the modern foundation of education, it seems reasonable to argue that most schools and administrators have become so focused on content oriented objectives-i.e. so that students can pass required assessment tests-that the importance of understanding knowledge acquisition has fallen by the wayside. Public education has become so heavily focused on content that there is relatively no emphasis placed on developing the processes that students need to become independent and autonomous learners. At the core, this appears to be one of the critical flaws of modern education. Rather than encouraging students to think outside of the box, educators are so afraid that the proper content will not be learned that they spend little, if any, time on developing the core basis of knowledge that students need to better understand how the content learned in class fits in with the larger environment and social experiences. When placed in this perspective, it becomes clear that the statement made by Brandt and Perkins is quite profound.