New national curriculum for 2016/17 school year
WORK is far advanced to establish the new National Standards Curriculum for the grades one to nine levels which is to come into operation for the beginning of the 2016/17 school year.
The goal of the new curriculum is to improve the general academic performance, attitude and behaviour of students, which is expected to redound to the positive shaping of the national social and economic fabric.
Under the new system, emphasis will be placed on project-based and problem-solving learning, with science, technology, engineering and mathematics/ science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics (STEM/STEAM) integrated at all levels.
The approaches will allow the learners to have hands-on experiences that are similar to real-world situations, making the learning experience less abstract and more concrete.
Chief Education Officer Dr Grace McLean said a team from the ministry will soon be undertaking stakeholder consultations.
“The development of this curriculum started about three years ago and we have already engaged a number of our teachers. We have a pilot that is currently going on with 49 schools; a pilot went on with 12 schools last year,” she said.
The new curriculum, she said, will allow students to utilise their own talents, and experiences in the learning process, while facilitating the increase use of information and communication technologies. (ICT)
In addition, civics will return to be a discrete discipline, while technical and vocational education and training (TVET) and Spanish will be formally introduced at the primary level.
Also, subject areas such as geography and history will be separated from social studies and will be offered separately, starting at Grade 7.
Chemistry, biology and physics have been separated from integrated sciences and will be offered separately at Grade 9.
The changes are aimed at ensuring that the requisite foundation for the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) in the disciplines is laid during the lower secondary years.
“We are actively engaged in our tertiary institutions, because their curriculum will need to be changed as well,” Dr McLean said, while pointing out that “our officers have gone on study tours to other countries so that they can have the kind of content on best practices to inform the development”.
She further stressed that a lot is being placed on training in order to make the new system “sustainable [and] embedded in practice within the institutions, so that our students can develop the skills that we expect them to have as they move into adulthood”.
— JIS
This article speaks to Unit 2 of the Advanced Citizenship Education outline. It highlights the point that with the new civics curriculum civics will be taught as a discrete subject, over the years Social Studies has served as an integrated subject which highlights some aspects of Civics, History and Geography. However much emphasis was not placed on civics as a discipline hence the reason for the new civics curriculum. Civics is a critical subject to a child's development and as such much emphasis should be placed in regards to civics in a bid to produce worthwhile citizens of society.
Contributor: Renae Simpson
The idea of this civics curriculum seeks to encourage the view of wide thinking not just seeing a subject area as separate but as part of a whole.
ReplyDeleteas far as i see it, it is an excellent idea that while changing the curriculum at the primary and secondary level it should also be changed at the tertiary level especially for teacher education students as we are the ones who will be teaching from these new curricula
ReplyDelete