Response to “The Three Curricula That All Schools Teach”

The first point that made me stop was Eisner’s discussion of the explicit curriculum. I think curriculum includes two important parts: content and competency. Content is necessary, but it is not the only goal of teaching. In BC, the Core Competencies are as important as content, if not more important. This reminded me of a conversation with my former principal, Eric. He told me that content was not the most important thing. If the actual situation did not allow me to finish every part of the content, this should not necessarily be a problem. However, I should pay more attention to the development of students’ competencies. I totally understand this idea. Knowledge that is not used in the future can be forgotten easily. Competencies may also become weaker if they are not used, but once students have developed them, they can usually be activated again when they are needed. For this reason, I think teachers should pay more attention to helping students develop the ability to think, communicate in standard mathematical language, and learn or even create independently, rather than focusing only on the transmission of knowledge.

The second point that made me stop was Eisner’s discussion of the implicit curriculum, especially the way schools use rewards, grades, and classroom structures to shape students’ behaviour. This affected me deeply because, in my own teaching, I have found that most students care a great deal about marks. Students naturally pay attention to the things that I pay attention to. Therefore, the feedback, rewards, and penalties that I give are very important. In mathematics teaching, if we only give most of the marks for the final answer, students may learn that the answer is more important than the thinking process. They may try to memorize procedures instead of figuring out how everything works. I think we should give more weight to mathematical thinking and the process of solving a problem. Besides, showing students how I assign marks for the steps and the reasoning behind them, and asking students to take notes about that, could also be very helpful. In this way, students can understand that explanations and showing steps are not just something for them to recite. The steps represent a way of thinking in mathematics.

The third point that made me stop was Eisner’s idea of the null curriculum. I think this is especially important in mathematics teaching. In my own teaching, I pay a lot of attention to explaining why students are learning a particular topic. For example, when teaching functions, I emphasize that functions help us describe and solve problems involving related variables in real life. I then give students many examples, and let them give me more examples and explain how to define the independent and dependent variables. The purpose is not only to help students understand the knowledge itself. More importantly, I want them to understand a basic idea: mathematical tools can serve practical life and production. Although some mathematics may be considered “pure mathematics,” history shows that many mathematical tools only seemed to have no application because people had not yet found a field where they could be used. I want students to develop the habit of seeing the things around them in a quantitative way. If this part is missing, the null curriculum may cause students to see mathematics as an isolated system of knowledge. This does not match the original meaning of mathematics as a tool for understanding the world. It can make mathematics more difficult to learn, and even if students work very hard and get good marks, they may still learn it only to get a score, and that would be pointless.

Overall, Eisner’s article expands my understanding of curriculum. The BC Provincial Curriculum provides important content and competencies, but what students actually learn also depends on our classroom assessment, feedback, examples, and the opportunities that we do or do not provide.