Curriculum Is The Cure

My previous blog spoke about what is generally haywire with the assessments that are happening at large in our country. And even as I thought about the issue, my mind was racing to think about where the solution to this entire premise could lie.

Dorothy De Zouche, a teacher in from Missouri, way back in 1945, once said, “If I can’t give a child a better reason for studying than a grade on a report card, I ought to lock my desk and go home and stay there.” And yes, her words ring true even today. Schools need to create learning experiences that do not culminate just in grades.

The question here is how?

The answer lies in creating a curriculum that is strong enough to harness the needs of a growing generation and potent enough to tap its potential. Howard Gardner observed, “One can have the best assessment imaginable but unless the accompanying curriculum is of quality, the assessment has no use.”

With the declaration of CCEs as a system of evaluation, the market is flooded with books that claim to help teachers create the right assessments and also provide them with rubrics that are personalised yet based on national standards. With the focus on evaluation, education today has been reduced to the sum total of all evaluations rather than the sum total of all experiences. None of these assessments that are flooding the market are based on the experiences of the student. They are created as standalone packages and can be implemented irrespective of the experiences of the student. The constant evaluations only facilitates the  creation of  teachers who are experts at finding out how well a student is able to retain a collection of facts without being able to find out how experiences at school  shape his/her life. Teachers today have become experts at ‘cracking’ the blueprint of papers and thus students are saddled with ‘sure-shot questions’ or ‘sample papers’.

This is where curriculum plays an important role. When the school integrates the assessments into the teaching-learning process, evaluation becomes a part of the entire educational experience and hence no longer proves to be a traumatic experience. Educationist Alfie Kohn says that there is enough research to substantiate the fact that when the curriculum is engaging, when it involves hands-on experiences and interactive learning activities, students who aren’t graded at all perform just as well as those who are graded (Moeller and Reschke, 1993).

A curriculum that interweaves its assessments so well into its teaching that students do not feel that they are being watched at every moment is the need of the day. This is where Kangaroo Kids plays a very different role in today’s educational space. The curriculum that is well researched and planned integrates into its experiences assessments so seamlessly that they form a part of the whole experience without sticking out like a sore thumb. A quality curriculum that hand holds the student and the teacher by integrating various experiences, cutting through subjects and soaring through the realm of free thinking and creativity is what makes this curriculum stand apart from the rest of the crowd.



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