As far as core curriculums go, I think having a list of things students should be able to do by the end of a course or semester is good to have to help guide teachers if they’re lost. However, I don’t think that curriculum should be obligatory or that it should be detailed out to the point of what needs to be done when. Often the assumption is, “well, the students get it or they don’t” rather than, “let’s help them where they are at and with what they actually want to learn”

1) No two classes should ever really be the same.
2) Hire good teachers and trust them. The fact that you think you have to force them to do their job and constantly check up on them is in itself one of the biggest problems at most schools.

Man, wish I learned yachting at school (no I don’t)

Part of the requirements of working in FE (further education) is to plan what you’re doing in a scheme of work, linking it with curriculum codes to the Adult ESOL Core Curriculum (a door-stop of a book if ever there was one) and typically I do this for the term (so Autumn term, then Spring then Summer). For ease (in case of absence of teachers due to illness or whatever) this is based on government produced materials (though how much you include them is up to you) and coursebooks. I don’t like the fact, but it does make it a whole lot easier if Peter phones in sick and someone else is teaching my group on a particular day. And I always say to other teachers teaching my group that if they have a better way of covering the particular point, then go for it! I’m planning to include a session a week which will just be for skills practice and dealing with any particular issues that crop up, either for individuals or the whole group.

Cheers for the inspiration, Nick. =)

While emergence deals with the present, I don’t think the curriculum always has to. As a teacher, you are constantly connecting emergent phenomena to what happened in the past as well as what you expect to encounter in the future. I also wouldn’t recommend a rigid adherence to the emergent part of the curriculum. If your students need work on talking about habits in the past, then plan on lesson on it. No reason not to do it simply because it didn’t emerge in that particular class.

However, lesson plans are never more than a loose guide of expected goals. This is where I think both 4-year programs and short CELTA courses really fail at explaining. Too many teachers are obsessed with “following the plan” who get all tied in knots when they get off the plan. And I’ve seen more than a few DoSes do the same to me in observations – “Well, you wrote 5 minutes here for practice, but it took 8.” Very silly. I like to think of plans as general outlines to be reworked on the spot as needed.

I agree with you on the failings of pre-service training to prepare teachers for this kind of thing. However, it can be done. I just finished up with a group of trainee teachers that already started showing signs of this ability within the limited 6 hours of teaching practice. With more time, it’s definitely possible. We just need to get away from this bare minimum of gadgets as you said.

Thanks for the comment

The idea might seem quite scary for the novice teacher (when s/he has a voice in curriculum development), since there’s a lack of research in the area it might seem unattainable, i.e. lack of evidence that an emergent curriculum can work well drives away the more pragmatic teacher, who relies on what was accomplished in the past to make present decisions. This is sort of a wrong route to emergence, which is concerned mainly about the present phenomena, in practical terms one can’t really plan more than the following lesson, that is, every lesson brings about unpredictable events that should be considered on the following one, and so on.
It is very possible for new teachers to work on something like this once the focus of their pre-service is on increasing their awareness of everything that goes on in the lesson, some small details, learners’ reaction and attitude towards every step taken, and of course an enhanced acknowledgement of the importance of flexibility, distributed leadership and responsibility, the power of self-organization, etc. Initial teacher training cannot be simply a survival kit with ‘teaching gadgets’.

Thanks for the links, I’ll sure take a good look at them .