Content area
Com texto completo
How can we know if a new course is doing what it was intended to do for students? Are things getting better or worse because of our curriculum planning? Are new courses serving the purpose for which they were intended? Programs that espouse transformation of teaching and Learning in middle level and high schools need a way to determine if their efforts are consistent with their plans.
The meetings are finished; the textbooks and materials have been purchased; the new course has been approved as an exciting addition to the formal curriculum. But how can we know if the course is doing what it was intended to do for students? How do we answer the question "How good is good enough"? Are things getting better or worse because of our curriculum planning? Are new courses serving the purpose for which they were intended? Is the process and product being delivered consistent with what was created and approved? How can we obtain data that will enable us to meet original intentions and to set into motion a process for subsequent course correction and improvement?
Often, when we fail to track systematically how a curriculum is implemented, it becomes our Achilles' heel. We need a way to determine if programs that espouse transformation of teaching and learning in middle level and high schools are succeeding. The process of benchmarking is a variation of curriculum auditing that has proven helpful in answering such questions. Our variation on the theme simplifies the process and makes it applicable at the individual school level.
We wished to develop a system that would effectively evaluate how and whether our plans were working. The bases for our efforts were derived from notions of quality control in business and industry by W. E. Deming (1993), who espoused creation of "constancy of purpose" for improving products and services. In the educational arena, Fenwick W. English (1998) advanced the idea of curriculum management "auditing" as a link "between values and works, policy and operations."
Curriculum auditing is a process of quality control. It seeks data sources that will best inform a learning community's stakeholders-boards of directors, school boards, school administration, teachers, students, and the public-about the direction, internal consistency, and effectiveness of the curriculum being...