What would a curriculum be, without a curriculum evaluation? I guess - possibly - a horribly ineffective and malicious document... But how can or should a curriculum be evaluated? Jack C. Richards makes a great point when describing the inadequacy of the evaluative tool 'mastery of objectives'. Obviously the results could be very skewed if all the students take tutoring lessons in addition to a course. But this really made me think about the evaluation of my own classroom. If I can't use the students' achievements as a gauge, then what do I use to decide whether my teaching is effective??? Mmmhh... a point to ponder some more...
The description of the audience for the evaluation seemed to take me back to the needs analysis. It seems that if we are going to use time and resources to do anything at all, we better justify it and make sure that we serve the purpose that we set out to serve and thus satisfy our stakeholders' thirst for knowledge. So, I guess we can't do an evaluation for the sake of doing it - no academic rationalism here!
My favorite quote from this chapter is the one by Weir and Roberts (1994) - p. 298:
"Where is the collective memory of decades of projects? Where does one go to learn from the mistakes and successes of similar projects in the past?" Here I am, so many times, feeling like I'm reinventing the wheel in my classroom... but I guess I can't help it since I don't know where to go to learn about the fabulous invention of the wheel!
That is a good question... "Where do we go?" I guess we don't learn from history and merely replicate the same ineffective and broken system again and again. I saw a trailer for a documentary Waiting For Superman, "either our kids are getting stupider every year or something is wrong in the education system". Unblinking look at what is going on in education today, hopefully will get to see it and see what solutions they suggest.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.waitingforsuperman.com/