Curriculum Reflection Essay

As I began this class in January my definition of curriculum was based on the academic coursework teachers use to instruct the information. Now my definition of curriculum is anything that falls under the auspice of the school that includes coursework, classroom arrangement, instruction, assessment, student engagement, and community involvement. My perspective is curriculum is what students learn in and out of the school. We need to teach students to become learners and problem solvers for the 21st century. I currently work at The Academy at Penncrest High School through the Simon Youth Foundation. The Mission of the Simon Youth Foundation is that it exists to help youth – who are at risk of dropping out of high school – graduate, develop life skills, and pursue post-secondary education and career paths. While I believe this is a great program for many of our students, we also need to also incorporate teaching students to survive in society. Our students use a curriculum called Grad Point which is an online curriculum where students can work individually on their goals and pass with a 70% …show more content…
The parents of our program need to understand their return on investment and challenge their children to succeed in society.
Steven Gross talks about turbulence theory and that turbulence is a way to get a positive outcome. Curriculum is the structured set of learning outcomes or the “what” of teaching. The better the agenda or curriculum, the more effective your teachers are, and the better you use assessment to drive instruction, the better your students will learn. Instruction is the facilitation of the curriculum plan and student engagement.
Demarse 2
Assessments are the continuum of learning and ongoing evaluation of both the teacher and student. Formative assessment is ongoing feedback and summative assessment is observation and performance and both are utilized to measure the effectiveness of