Curriculum evaluation is a helpful tool to monitor and improve the effectiveness of learning outcomes in school settings by regularly assessing the curriculum’s value and addressing its faults. The evaluation can focus on a plethora of educational components, such as programs, textbooks, and instructional strategies, on different managerial levels (Ornstein & Hunkins, 2018). Classroom teachers are directly affected by the curriculum evaluation process because they have to implement the improvements, understand how the issues were resolved, and exercise their judgment in real-life classroom scenarios.
The curriculum evaluation is vital to a teacher because it directly influences their workflow by making them adjust their instructional strategies and students’ learning strategies (Ornstein & Hunkins, 2018). In essence, curriculum evaluation is concerned with a continuous process of collecting, analyzing, and employing data to help students learn better (Lam, 2016). In order to accurately implement new recommendations, a teacher might be required to be included in the formative evaluation process to understand new solutions better.
Informally, a teacher plays a fundamental role in curriculum evaluation because of the value of their critical judgment. For example, Eisner’s model calls for predicting students’ needs (Lam, 2016). Although it is the responsibility of education policy planners, individual classroom teachers can adopt this approach on a smaller scale to support their students. Essentially, depending on the school’s policies and guidelines, a teacher becomes the evaluator.
Overall, although a classroom teacher is usually not as involved in the formal process of curriculum evaluation, their impact on student’s education calls for a profound understanding of identified issues and proposed solutions. A teacher can informally affect the assessment within the classroom dimension by anticipating individual students’ educational needs.
References
Lam, C. C. (2016). Utilizing curriculum evaluation to improve the school’s curriculum. In K. T. H. Kiat, M. A. Heng, & Lim-Ratnam. C. (Eds.), Curriculum Leadership by Middle Leaders (1st ed., pp. 241–256). Routledge.
Ornstein, A.C. & Hunkins, F.P. (2018). Curriculum: Foundation, principles, and issues (7th ed). Pearson Education.