The curriculum and the pedagogy courses offered by the Department of Curriculum and Instruction are designed to research, develop, implement and evaluate knowledge and practices that increase student achievement within and outside of school. There are two keywords in the name of our department that demand intense investigation and constant questioning – curriculum and instruction.
Curriculum refers to everything available to be learned in school and is essentially the roadmap for learning. It is the WHAT your students are expected to learn and the WHAT you are expected to teach. It is the written standards and benchmarks of content, skills, performances, attitudes and values your students must master in any given grade, in any given school subject.
Instruction refers to the means by which learning will be achieved; this is the HOW you teach the curriculum, how your students learn it and how you assess whether they have learned it. Instruction is the purposeful activity designed to support learning in an effort to develop minds; it is the sharing of learning from one person to another. This is where the teacher, as artist, shines and where each teacher and student will vary, where there is no magic bullet or right answer. However, there are certain strategies, approaches, and tools that are more likely to help than others. It is these tools that the department aims to help make your own.