Tips for planning a curriculum

Throughout your teaching career, there will be times when you have to create curricula for your subjects from scratch. Looking ahead at how you are going to teach an entire subject can be quite daunting.

Follow our tips to break down the steps of making a curriculum and put your mind at ease.

Start with the guidelines

Wherever you teach, you will have to abide by certain guidelines.

These external rules of how you teach may come from the country’s government in the form of state education standards. They will require to include certain subject content within your lessons and will set out the required quality of teaching in schools generally.

In addition, the school you are teaching at will have its very own mission statement and values that you must embody in all of your work there.

Before you start making a curriculum, you need to make sure you have a full knowledge of both of these factors to ensure your content meets national standards and is in line with what is expected from your particular school.

Think about what you want your students to get out of the subject

Think about what the subject should mean to your students. Is it an essential life skill or is it an area that will enrich their cultural knowledge? When considering these, think about how you can relate the subject matter to what is going on in your students’ lives or events in the news.

Relating your subjects to what students already know or care about will keep them engaged and make them eager to learn about the topic. You can then build these links into your curriculum planning, perhaps with a clearer idea of how you will deliver the content.

Know what your students need to know

Before putting together a curriculum, you need to know everything your students need to learn. At this point, make a list of all the course content you will include.

This might be specified by the government’s education standards you become familiar with earlier, or your school might have control over what is taught. You can also look to any textbooks your students will have as part of their learning to know what content to list.

Cluster content

With your list of all the subject matter you will include, it is time to group content together. Look for concepts or subject matters that are directly related to each other, or even ones that just complement one another.

When teaching, you want all of your students to feel like they are understanding and remembering information they learn in class, so you want to group concepts in a way that will not confuse them.

Once you have your groups of different parts of the course content, you can put them in an order of how they will be taught. A good way to do this is to start with the most simple or introductory information of the subject and then move into more complex topics.

Come up with learning objectives

Now that you know what you are going to teach, you must assign a learning objective to each topic. This will help you keep on track when you go into the stage of planning each individual lesson.

A learning objective is a sentence or a list of sentences of what your students will have learnt by the end of each topic. You can use this information to break down how concepts will be taught on a practical level and it can be used to measure and assess students’ academic progress.

If you are teaching a subject with external assessment and exams, you will need to make sure your lesson objectives align with all the content students need to know for these.

Put it all together

All the components of your curriculum are now ready. You have an outline of topics of your subject listed in the order you will teach them and you have assigned each of these appropriate lesson objectives. Your next stage will be to make lesson plans for each lesson.

If this is a subject you are teaching in the upcoming academic year, you can assign dates to when you will teach each part of your curriculum, stating lengths of time for each topic. You can also distribute curricula to other teachers who are teaching the same subject.

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