Planned Curriculum

Planned curriculum refers to documents that shape the content to be covered when teaching. These documents arise out of policy environments and reflect what is deemed required or necessary for students to learn at specific levels of education or educational settings. Typically, planned curriculum documents are created by governments, publishers of subject matter series, publishers of assessments, or boards of education. Planned curriculum can be categorized in two ways: curriculum that is prescribed or curriculum that is subscribed. Prescribed planned curriculum expects teachers to follow a defined set of objectives or outcomes, whereas a subscribed planned curriculum provides outcomes or objectives but allows for some teacher selection. Typically, planned curriculum is mandated at some level for teachers to use in their teaching and teachers are supervised in some manner to ensure their use of the planned curriculum.

In some countries or jurisdictions, the government mandates a planned curriculum that teachers are legally bound to implement. In other contexts, school boards or jurisdictions take up the published curriculum and expect teacher implementation. Implementation of planned curriculum places teachers within a policy conduit where curriculum is seen as something beyond the lives of teachers and learners and reduces the professional autonomy of teachers to choose curriculum that supports learners in a learning relationship.

The development of official planned curriculum may involve teachers, curriculum specialists in school jurisdictions, and government curriculum specialists. In the development of curriculum documents, to connect planned curriculum to the field, teachers may be asked to “test drive” new curricula in their classrooms and suggest refinements. The inclusion of practicing teachers has located these curriculum documents in teacher practice; however, by nature, planned curriculum is generalized and treats learners as a homogenized group. Planned curricula are a purposeful progression of a generalized trajectory of concepts that build one on the other as learners become more sophisticated or knowledgeable in a subject area. The subject matter is fixed at different levels and subsequent levels assume knowledge gained at prior levels in the plan. This ties to evaluation and establishes benchmarks for assessing learners and monitoring teacher practice.

Because of this, planned curriculum is often narrow and rigid by nature and, because of the scope of a planned curriculum, cannot be responsive to specific learner and teacher situations. Historically, planned curriculum was couched in terms of objectives, which set direction for teaching practice, but there has been a shift to a language of outcomes. This is a significant difference in planned curriculum because it focuses on learners and what they will be able to produce at the end of a curriculum enacted by a teacher within the policy conduit. Planned curriculum is not relational in its structure beyond a vague expectation that teachers and learners in an educational relationship will achieve set objectives or outcomes. A planned curriculum by nature does not acknowledge the possibility of true relationship where teachers provide a curriculum responsive to the needs of individual learners. In tension with planned curriculum is the lived curriculum of the people involved in the curriculum making that arises out of educative situations.

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