Well I am not from academics hence I cannot comment on that part of the question. But I have worked in 'Learning and Development' area in the Professional corporate world where we need to develop curriculum for improving employee performance or to make more employees formally qualified in specific business areas where we need to focus.

Generally the issues I have seen in curriculum development for professionals are that:-

• Those who design the curriculum are not exactly clear about the learning outcomes they wish to achieve. The learning outcomes have to be tangible and by the end of the course the learner should have gained knowledge and skills.
• Curriculum development is not only important in bringing change at micro level but also at macro level by directly setting the growth or culture trajectory for your organization.
• I have found that blended learning approach is a much better strategy than single approach.
• Most of the course developers focus on the satisfaction quotient of the learners as the yardstick for the course success and not the quantitative data whether there was any difference in performance outcomes.

Now coming from a developing country India I can clearly tell what my curriculum lacked. We as students, were encouraged to mindlessly memorize the theories and the content of each subject. There are no brownie points for understanding the subject and learning it, all the system cared for was that whether I was able to reproduce what is written in the texts word by word. What our curriculum largely lacked was the following:-

• Critical thinking
• Civic knowledge and Community Engagement
• Developing Good Oral and Written Communication Skills in All the Languages You Learnt at School (What is the purpose of learning a language when you cannot communicate effectively in it?)
• Research and Analysis (Students should be encouraged to have inquiry and analysis as part of learning and that behavior sets the scene for creating future innovators)
• Teamwork

I guess grading system tied with rubrics would be a better pattern of assessment. The curriculum should also not focus just on traditional passive learning lecture format with didactic exercises. The curriculum should have focus on various teaching modalities and this would ensure holistic development of students.

Dear Sruthi,

Hailing from Pakistan, I can very well relate to multiple points that you shared here. Giving you an overview of this part of the world, following are some of the practices:

• Learning outcomes are obscure and often made on the basis of intuition rather than empirical quantitative research-based findings.
• Astonishingly, our curriculum aims at targeting macro level goals of increasing national solidarity, but it forms a small part of curriculum. We can say that this part of curriculum is based on ideological values. Otherwise, our curriculum largely follows socioeconomic development model inspired by what Friere used to called banking model of education.
• Unlike your point of view, the yardstick for the successful implementation of curriculum is not satisfaction but an acquisition of certain objectives reflected in learning outcomes.

I agree with all of your points, and same is the case here, our curriculum hardly teaches critical thinking, civic engagement, research and analytical skills or communicative competence in various languages. And yes, regarding the forms of assessment, students always remain deprived of a formal set of rubrics of assessment.

Dear Maryam,

I would like first to know which country you belong to and what context does the above-given account relate to.

Secondly, you are right. I came across the same thing in Pakistani context that syllabus is often taken to be as curriculum.

In my context, teachers did not feel the part of curriculum development process, and in reality too they are not concerned with at any level for the same. Curriculum is planned at macro level but when it comes to implementation, tertiary bodies have their freewill to teach whatever they want to, at least in the case of materials and rubrics of assessment. However, in K-12 scenario, the textbooks are largely standardized but there are multiple schooling systems in Pakistan which use varying curriculum, some of them designed outside Pakistan. That is a shame in itself.

Yes, for years in Pakistan too, no radical change has been witnessed in curriculum design. Some changes are made here and there into existing one.

Passing on of values is very restricted to only national unity. Other values are hardly passed on to students through curriculum. Their success is assessed by how many skills they exhibit at the end of an academic session.

At least, I have never seen an endeavor assessing the needs, again they are decided on the whims and intuitions of the curriculum designers.

Exactly so. At lower level i.e. Primary or Elementary level it is very difficult to understand the distinction between Syllabus and Curriculum. But at the upper level, teachers are well aware about the two. Now-a-days, lots of Workshops, Pre-service, In-service Training for teachers are organised in India.

I consider the issue from a senior language arts perspective, having taught classes in curriculum and instruction for twenty years. In all that time, even though I was dealing with English majors who had already completed their Bachelor's degrees, I rarely found a student who was aware that a secondary English teacher does more than teach literature; in particular, my students (numbering in the thousands over two decades) were largely unaware that the secondary curriculum in the American states and Canadian provinces expects teachers of English Language Arts to cover writing (not merely "creative" writing) and grammar. For people who would have to grade student papers on syntax, diction, and grammar, they showed very little understanding of English grammar and could not satisfactorily explain how to correct such common errors as a fragment, a singular-plural shift, and a dangling modifier. My conclusion is that, but for the teacher-candidates qualifying for French, most of my students had simply not been taught composition and grammar when they were in secondary school; rather, they were expected to pick it up by osmosis.

I think because teachers are not usually part of the process of developing the curriculum but rather given it to implement, they cannot always know and take ownership of it. But I have found in our teacher education programmes, our students do have knowledge of it and where to find it.

Best regards,

Debra

The modern view of the teaching cancel what was prevalent in ancient times it was no longer the transfer of information is the only mission to teach, but activity plan aims to achieve the desired educational outcomes of students where the teacher planning and management of this activity . Thus, the teacher and learner have new roles according to the modern view of the process of teaching, the teacher will not be limited to the delivery of information, and students will not be limited to their role in keeping this information in preparation to be heard. Studies have shown the need to take care of the motivation of individuals to learn and knowledge and therefore use it to increase learning and guidance and this modern view of teaching increases the role of the learner in exchange for reducing the role of the teacher is the target and the beneficiary. Therefore, this research will deal with effective teaching as a method of education, which will explain its most important aspects and the characteristics of the effective teacher and the effective school.

I Agree With Philip Allingham

The pivotal role of the teacher in the entire scheme curriculum is so critical that teacher should be much aware of the nitty gritty of what he/she superinds. what ever the curriculum finally becomes is function of the teacher/teaching: teacher can make a "good" curriculum "bad" and a "bad" curriculum "good". But my worry is that most teacher's actions and pedagogical practices at most runs tangential to what real curriculum implementation should be.

I think that the awareness of teachers about the curricula in my country is not high because the curricula have changed dramatically without the teachers being involved in this change or without preparing them or involving them in training courses about curricula changes

In the university where I am affiliated with, the faculty members are involved in the curriculum development. Workshops are held annually to review the existing curriculum and streamline it to align it with the government-mandated curriculum and university standards.

In Iraq, the curriculum is imposed on both teachers and learners by the Ministry of Higher Education and Ministry of Education! The process of curriculum development is not transparent: we - as teachers - do not know the criteria according to which the curriculum is made.