What is Curriculum Design?

Curriculum design is operationally defined as the intentional planning, organization, and design of learning strategies, processes, materials, and experiences towards defined learning and/or performance outcomes. Curriculum design is concerned with much more than learning materials. In one sense, curriculum design is creating a holistic plan for the environments where learning happens. This includes considering the physical, digital, social, and psychological factors that define the spaces and places where people learn.

The primary goal of curriculum design is aligning learning strategies, materials, and experiences to defined outcomes. From this standpoint, good curriculum should be results-focused and efficient. To accomplish this, curriculum designers often use tools such as learner personas, needs analysis, and existing assessment data to determine the scope of a project. From there, it becomes important to develop learning strategies that connect to the characteristics of the intended learners to help them reach the desired outcomes.

Designing a curriculum isn’t easy. It is a complicated process that needs to be carefully thought through and involves much strategic decision making. With more than 15 years’ experience supporting many schools; we have identified our own crucial steps of effective curriculum design. Following these steps to design your curriculum, whether you are starting from scratch or reviewing your existing curriculum will affect dramatically in the performance of your school.

Steps of Curriculum Design

Step 1: Principles and purpose – Set out the intent of your curriculum

Begin the design process by establishing your curriculum principles. The curriculum principles should reflect your school’s values, context, pedagogical approaches and needs. You should be able to explain the purpose or intent of your curriculum.

Step 2: Entitlement and enrichment – Develop your pupil entitlement

After clarifying your principles and purpose, you should set out your pupil entitlement (sometimes known as pupil offer). The pupil entitlement should explain how you intend to enrich the curriculum with educational visits, extracurricular activities and specific experiences.

Step 3: Breadth and balance – Develop the content of your curriculum

You will need to arrange your curriculum content into a range of engaging themes and projects. Make strategic decisions about what your curriculum covers, how it interconnects, and in how much depth lessons are taught to achieve both breadth and balance within and across subjects. These choices and decisions create your school’s curriculum structure or long term plan.

Step 4: Teaching narrative – Plan the delivery of your curriculum

After organising your long term plans, your teachers need to plan the detail of how they will deliver each project. A teaching narrative should be clearly sequenced, cohesive and based on sound pedagogical practice. It should detail the starting point for each project and explain how it will develop. Planning should show how subject objectives will be taught, revisited and met, and outline the desired outcomes. This process creates a medium term plan that can be elaborated on for short term plans if required.

Tip: Make the planning process easy, so that teachers can create, adapt and share plans with others. Ideally, this stage should be supported by integrated, quick assessment for learning tools.

Step 5: Resources – Source high quality resources to deliver your curriculum

You now need to identify the resources required to bring your curriculum to life and enhance its coherence. A good curriculum needs high quality resources. These include human resources, practical equipment, community partners, environments and teaching resources.

Tip: Create or source high quality resources to support the lessons, rather than the other way around. Keep a school wide overview of resources to avoid unnecessary repetition and ensure that content builds in complexity.

Step 6: Review and evaluate – Decide what works well and where there is room for improvement

You now have an established curriculum. The next step is to regularly review its impact on teaching and learning and to make any adaptations or changes. It will help to consider your original curriculum principles and purposes when reviewing and focus on areas for development in school. At this stage, you may identify Continued Professional Development (CPD) and curriculum support needs for staff.

Finally

Of course, these steps are a simplification of a more complicated process, but they are a good place to start. Several ingredients that have a significant impact on your curriculum design are missing here. For example, the unique combination of the staff at your school, their knowledge and experiences, your children’s passions and interests and the creativity that you bring to the process