Is your school district or corporation reviewing your education curriculum to meet local, state and national benchmarks? Has your school struggled and struggled to meet the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) mandates? Possibly, you have failed to include these three basic elements when developing curriculum.
Goals
The goal of writing curriculum is to secure specific measurable results. Have you considered including a proven goal setting process as part of the curriculum when developing curriculum?
Goals are something that is present within the school classrooms across America. Yet, goal setting and goal achievement are not actively taught. Does it not make sense to have a proven goal setting process for your middle school students, high school students and even post secondary students?
These young people's future performance will be based upon their ability to set and achieve goals in the workforce. Yet, if they never have the opportunity to learn how to set and achieve goals in a protected environment, how will they learn in the real world?
Attitude Redevelopment
This is a quick question for any educator and possibly curriculum developer who is reading this article. How much time did you spend in your educational process to learn how to redevelop attitudes? Unless you are an instructional designer or have an advanced degree, the answer is usually less than 15 minutes in some educational psychology course.
If attitudes, the desire, to want to do something are so critical to learning, does it not make sense to include this element in developing curriculum? Would this not put learning within the responsibility of the students and remove it from the teachers? Remember, learning is about change and accepting change must come from inside each individual.
Self Leadership Skills
Look at any curriculum for middle school and high school students and you will discover the emphasis on reading and writing. These are two essential skill sets for being a good communicator, but communication is mostly non-verbal. Except for the speech and debate students, most students are not taught how to be truly effective communicators.
Or how about time management? With the demands of classes and extra curricular activities, many young people (not to mention adults) find great difficulty in managing their time. Yet, where is time management in most education curriculums? It is not present. So, once again, young people are set up to fail.
Communication and time management are just two of the strong interpersonal skills necessary for success in today's highly competitive global marketplace. These soft skills are really self leadership skills. The ability to lead yourself must come before you can lead others.
When you are developing curriculum, consider infusing goals, attitude redevelopment and self leadership skills for your middle school students, high school students and post secondary students. Taking such action is truly about working smarter and not harder in your ongoing efforts to meet academic benchmarks.