The Teachers Guide to Refining Your Curriculum

Refining Curriculum

Depending on where you teach, your degree of control over the curriculum will change a little. While you might not have a whole lot of control over the curriculum, you can control how you decide to teach it. The results that your students receive speak directly to your efficacy as a teacher. It is why it is important that you continually look for ways to revise and refine your teaching methods and the curriculum too. Read on to learn more.

Consider the Pace

You need to look at your curriculum through your students’ eyes. Not every element of the curriculum will need to be worked through at the same speed. Some things might require more time and others less. Don’t be afraid to change up the pace at which you are moving through the curriculum. If you are worried about getting off track, then you could always change your approach to homework, asking students to read ahead or supplement their own understanding as needed. Varying the pace and the methods help to avoid stagnation and ensure that none of your students is going to fall behind.

Embrace Flexibility

You should also try to be more flexible in your approach to teaching the curriculum. Depending on where all of your students are, in terms of knowing the materials, you could always choose to omit or skip over certain elements, think about this when writing your lesson plans. If they already get the concepts or if you feel that it doesn’t particularly add anything to the lessons, then don’t be afraid to skip them. Obviously, this will depend on what you teach and at what level; some teachers might not be able to stray too far from the curriculum in front of them.

Get Feedback from your Students

If you really want to know whether your approach to teaching the curriculum is effective or not, then who better to ask than the students themselves? Getting some feedback from the students can really help you to refine your approach and learn what is working as opposed to what isn’t. Using something like Vevox: a live poll app, can really help you to tabulate the responses from your students quickly in order to work out where you can adjust your approach to make it more effective.

To Conclude

You can get a pretty good idea of how effective your current approach to the curriculum is by looking at the classroom performance, grades and test results. As an educator, your desire should be to ensure that your students succeed; you are directly responsible for their success, after all. Adapting your approach to the curriculum doesn’t necessarily have to be particularly difficult.

The tips above should help. Think about the pace at which you are teaching; slow it down or speed it up as necessary. You can also skip or emit certain elements if you don’t think that your students need them. Finally, ask your students how you can improve as a teacher or what they would change about the curriculum if they could help to make it more accessible.