Tips for understanding the curriculum – For parents

With the advent of the epidemic, many parents found it is important to be aware of things they weren’t in their children’s learning.

The idea of moving a large part of the teaching and learning process home and holding parents responsible for more was new to people in general.  This creates a lot of confusion in families and certainly affected the children’s achievement in the end, and there are many studies that talk about this effect globally as a result of the lack of sufficient knowledge of basic concepts in education.

One of the most important concepts that parents need to take care of and learn its meaning is: what is a curriculum?

The difference between curriculum, content, skills, applications, and tasks.

In this series of articles, I don’t want people to think that we should all be experts in education, but I’m just excited for you to learn basic ideas that will make helping your children more successful and the whole experience more enjoyable!

The curriculum simply can be expressed as the general comprehensive plan for teaching students and includes written concepts (such as those in the content of textbooks) and unwritten concepts (such as life skills and the so-called 4Cs (Collaboration, Communication, Creativity, Critical thinking) with a framework for the evaluation process in the plan.

As is clear from this proposition, we will find a difference between the curriculum and the written content, so there are many educational systems such as the International Baccalaureate system, and the Canadian system does not adhere strongly to a specific book for teaching the curriculum.  This is the first lesson we must learn.

We can diversify the learning resources for children, we have a school book, we have YouTube, and we have educational sites and applications that present what the student is supposed to understand clearly and in more than one way to match the mentality of your son or daughter.

The question here is: How do I know that this content is suitable for my son?

This brings us to the second concept that we need to know, which is the educational outcomes or objectives.

Each lesson in any book must first try on a list of educational goals or educational outcomes… There are many names and the difference here in the term has meanings, but we will talk about that later.  In this way, the parent will be able to choose from various sources that are suitable for his son/ daughter.

It remains that we focus on the goals and take care of the mentioned terms.

Example: The student discusses with evidence the difference between plants and animals…

Here we must take these words seriously, to discuss, I mean, interact with someone else, and know how to provide shreds of evidence that support the claim he is making, and so on… All of this will be known from where?  From the content that deals, whether written, visual,… etc.

All we are saying is that we will discuss it in more detail because the topic needs time and clarification, but in the end, the results will be impressive!