EDG4376 Reflection #8

Any curriculum designed for any school needs to focus on combining student needs, state frameworks, and national standards. However, to me, covering state and national standards can be quite a tedious task within any given school year. It can be done, but it is imperative that school administrators make the curriculum engaging and interesting for the students. Students might be able to store facts in their short-term memories for test purposes, but I assure you, if the information is not relevant or appealing to their lives, that information will be gone by the very next day. Therefore, learner relevancy is imperative to the curriculum designer. For instance, as schools become more and more diverse throughout America, administrators need to combat prejudice and discrimination by integrating tolerance, compassion, and acceptance into students’ everyday lives. Students’ thinking processes, emotions, cultural backgrounds, and developmental stages need to be addressed in curriculum design as well. At the end of the day, it is a collaborative effort on the teachers and administrators to ensure that students are being taught what they need to know in an effective manner. If learner relevancy is made to be a significant concept in curriculum design, everyone will benefit. Students will be engaged in the discovery process and excited to learn, which will make the teaching process easier and more rewarding for educators and administration. Furthermore, if students are learning, as opposed to just memorizing facts, state and national standards will be met with ease. There are many different views on exactly how a school’s curriculum should be organized and integrated, but the majority of educational researchers agree that course content should be connected in such a way that the student benefits and feels that they are learning to deal with real world situations. Therefore, to the curriculum designer, learner relevancy is everything. I think the demographics of the student body in any given school should play a large part of how the curriculum should be designed. It is up to administration to determine whether the curriculum is fragmented, connected, nested, sequenced, shared, webbed, threaded, integrated, immersed, or networked. However, administration definitely needs to put learner relevancy first.