Trends and Issues On Curriculum and Curriculum Development

Trends and Issues on Curriculum
and Curriculum Development

What are the trends that you observed?
Researches on Curriculum Development
(Local)
Implementation of the Senior High School Curriculum
• A total of 13 years from kindergarten to grade 12 mandatory and free in the public schools.
• Grade 11 to 12 classes in the private schools or universities/colleges are subsidized through the voucher
program.
• Students’ chosen SHS strands is used as a requirement for college admission. This is based on aptitude,
interests, and school capacity.
• Students will undergo standardized assessments (aptitude tests, national career assessment examination –
NCAE and occupational interest test to empirically determine their strengths and interests leading to strand
preference.
• Curriculum guides are distributed to elementary, junior and SHS teachers to use as a tool for teaching
instructions based on standards.
• Mass training was conducted to prepare prospective SHS teachers in the actual implementation of the
curriculum.
• The purpose of the SHS curriculum is for graduates to demonstrate essential knowledge, skills and behaviors
that will increase their employability to the relevant industries.
Implementation Challenges of SHS
Curriculum
• The resources of a particular area dictate what SHS strands will be
offered.
• Inadequacy of facilities. It is more glaring in the public schools
particularly for hard sciences and technical/vocational courses.
• Lack of qualified teachers. The teacher education curriculum does not
include preparing teachers to teach in the SHS level.
• Difficulty of the private schools in particular to apply for permission to
offer SHS levels because of the many very idealistic requirements.
• Lack of buildings, simulation spaces and laboratories especially for
technical and hard science courses in the different strands.
Curricular Policies
1. Globalization. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, globalization still prospers. This can be evidenced by the country’s compliance to
international standards such as the ASEAN Qualifications Reference Framework (AQRF) which officially recognizes the Philippines version of
Qualifications Framework (PQF). The AQRF is predominantly benchmarked with prestigious global standards e.g. Malcolm Baldridge quality
framework, European and Australian qualifications framework.
2. Technological advances. With the advent of industrial revolution 4.0 (Internet of Things, Rise of the Machines), teaching and learning are
not just delivered face-to-face but other flexible modes as well that are highly technology-integrated and embedded. The current health
crisis has popularized in the Philippines the use of learning management system (LMS) and open technologies to sustain quality of teaching
and learning processes.
3. Holistically developed lifelong learners. More than ever, education has over emphasized on producing graduates who are equipped with
21st century competencies (e.g. critical thinking, problem solving, decision making, global citizenship, ability to work in teams etc.).
4. Culturally sensitive curriculum and inclusivity. This means education for all. Regardless of race, ethnicity, color, social economic status,
religion, gender etc. all students should be educated. This requirement makes contextualization or indigenization of curriculum an important
feature of the new curriculum.
5. Child protection policy (DepEd Order 40, series of 2012) which seeks to protect “children in school from abuse, violence, exploitation,
discrimination, bullying, and other forms of abuse”. This procedure has significantly affected the teacher’s classroom management and
paved the way for differentiated instruction which responds to the needs and interests of students.
6. Competency/outcome-based curriculum. There is now a heavier focus on the deployment of performance over traditional assessment
tasks. This means that the performance of students is matched with established grade-level, content and performance standards.
7. Expectation vs reality. The curricular goals do not match with the realities of the classroom particularly for the public schools.
What accounts as quality curriculum?
Researches on Curriculum Development (Foreign)
1. High expectations. All students including those academically struggling, when informed about the challenges and expectations of the
curriculum will result in the increase of academic achievement. In other words, a quality curriculum should be able to challenge the
intellectual, psychological and physical domains of the learners
2. Responsiveness. Since the curriculum is dynamic and continually evolving, the assessment, evaluation and continuous quality
improvement are designed to determine its relevance and significance to the needs of the learners and society in general.
3. Coherence. The principle of sequence and content curation of curriculum will help establish the chronology of topics, activities,
formative and summative assessment tasks. You may refresh yourself with the spiral curriculum of Bruner, where learning is premised on
prior learning.
4. Stakeholders involvement. One trademark of a quality curriculum is when key stakeholders such as the parents, teachers, students,
people from the relevant industries, representatives from government agencies and local government among others are actively involved
in the curriculum planning, assessment, evaluation and continuous quality improvement.
5. Flexibility. The centralized system of the Philippine education lessens the degree of flexibility of its curricular offerings. The review
of the curriculum typically is only done after 3-5 years based on the strategic plan of the government. However, in terms of
implementation, the schools and teachers are given freedom to exercise flexibility in terms of pace, criteria by which students’
performance will be assessed, the learning experiences, teaching strategies and methods and the completion time.
6. Learner-centeredness. In today’s pedagogical landscape, there is a general shift from teaching to learning, from instruction to
assessment, from what to how students learn, from cognition to metacognition, from direct instruction to guided discovery, from
individualized to collaborative problem learning among others. These shifts define the learner-centeredness principle of curriculum
design and development.
Quality Teacher’s Knowledge
1. Content knowledge. Pre-requisite to becoming a quality teacher is one’s expertise of the subject being taught. A
teacher with a trivial content knowledge is as good as not teaching at all. What separates teachers from pretending
to be teachers is expertise. This implies that should really prepare for the challenges of teaching. For pre-service
teachers, you can endlessly update yourself with the trends and developments of your subject through research.
For in-service teachers, deepening one’s content knowledge can be done through professional development
activities such as pursuing master’s or doctorate degree or attendance to training and seminars relevant with the
subject being taught.
2. Pedagogical knowledge. The set of skills on how to teach covers pedagogical knowledge. This includes the
seamless conduct of teaching-learning activities and classroom management skills. However, a teacher who is good
in pedagogical knowledge does not automatically mean the teacher also has content knowledge.
3. Pedagogical content knowledge. The competence of the teacher to choose appropriate and constructively
aligned teaching and learning activities or strategies in teaching the content is pedagogical content knowledge.
4. Technological pedagogical content knowledge. The advent of COVID-19 and advancement of technology in and
of education now requires teachers to be technologically-savvy. In today’s instructional landscape, the use of
learning management systems (LMS), open technologies, open educational resources, course wares and the
maximization of blended-online and other flexible learning delivery modes.
THE END😊😊

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