Textbook Responses - Book Report/Review Example

Curriculum and Differentiation Curriculum and Differentiation The main points developed in the chapter include the importance of the quality of the curriculum to which instruction is made on students for the achievement of previously set objectives. A quality curriculum has five characteristics including that it is organized around essential content goals, engaging for students, focuses on students understanding, authentic, and is aligned to content goals, learning experiences, and assessments.

The other main point in the chapter is that curriculum races are not friendly to learning and that differentiation entails ensuring the variances in students are considered in curriculum development. Among the important details are the need for the involvement of the students and the teachers in the development of a quality curriculum for the incorporation of curriculum discipline and representation of the views of the learners. The details supporting a curriculum having content goals is that it ensures goals and objectives depict the quintessence of the discipline to be studied by the students and explicitly shows the understanding, knowledge, and skills for the students to gain within the stipulated period.

Specificity of the curriculum ensures good investment of efforts and time for teachers and students and gives students a sense of meaning in learning. The details given for the unfriendliness of curriculum races to learning are the limited capacity of working memory and the requirement for reflection for new learning. The other details include that alignment entails ensuring the knowledge; skills and understanding are all aimed at meeting the needs of the teacher and students by the curriculum and that the development of frameworks of meaning for the support of student understanding.

Students are engaged when the curriculum is motivating for them and it is authentic when the curriculum details students as knowledge generators and problem solvers. This reading supports my professional skills, knowledge, and/or understanding in that it enables me to know the criteria for a quality curriculum, the need for my involvement in problem solving knowledge generation, the need for the creation of a curriculum that considers learner differences, and develops my understanding of curriculum development.

The question that comes up from the chapter is if the curriculum used meets the needs of both the students and teachers are met in the learning process. The other idea that came with the reading is the need for curriculum creators to take insight of the views of students and other stakeholders in the curriculum development process.