Constraints
What are the program constraints?
-Technological: ICT, lab, LCDs etc.
-Timing: Implementation, Readiness
- Duration: Length lectures,
- Co-curriculum, practicum, internship, etc
Who is going to provide the cost of the training?
Allowances, other payments etc
Constraints
Did your list of the constraints in developing your curriculum
include the following?
1 It is not a task with which everyone in schools is
familiar.
2 It is unlikely that the curriculum can take into account every
local tradition.
3 The curriculum you would like to offer may well be constrained
by a lack of physical resources.
4 There may be problems in selecting a language of instruction
which suits the needs of every pupil.
5 Some teachers believe that they have to follow the official
curriculum exactly.
6 No procedures have been developed in our school or time
allowed for curriculum development work.
Constraint Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary
- A thing that limits or restricts something, or your freedom to
do something
Curriculum Constraints
The other side of setting curriculum-design specifications is
identifying the constraints placed on what the design can be like.
There are always
constraints on design. They may take the form of what will not
be permitted and what conditions must be taken into account. As
with goals,
constraints need to be made explicit if they are to influence
curriculum design. A major impediment to the attainment of
curriculum goals is the lack
of sufficient time for instructionhours per day, days per year.
In the history of modern education, curricula have been expected to
serve more and
more goals with few ever being eliminated. An honest
acknowledgment of this limitation leads to a conflict among goals:
Some goals need to be
given up if others are to be met. There is a very real danger
that when curriculum committees come up with a delineation of K-12
learning goals,
whether their own or adopted, they will fail to purge previous
goals that on examination they might find to have lower
priorityacting, in other words, as though the time constraint
were not real. Along with time, public discomfort with certain
topics (notably human
reproduction and evolution) can be a barrier that must be dealt
with in curriculum design. Some others are state policies, state
and federal legislation,
court orders, cost, faculty unpreparedness, lack of suitable
instructional materials, standardized tests inadequately aligned to
learning goals, college
admission requirements, union contracts, and longstanding
traditions. And above all, there is the limitation of not knowing
enough about student
learningwhat students can and cannot learn under various
circumstances.
A rush to accommodate perceived barriers by lowering ones sights
should be resisted, however. After all, except for established
physical laws,
constraints are not necessarily forever. Laws can be changed,
budgets raised, traditions recast over time. Curriculum designers
should neither ignore
constraints nor assume they are insurmountable, but they should
try to identify them carefully. As constraint issues come up at any
stage in the
design process, it is important to find out what latitude there
may be for dealing with them. For example, university admission
practices can be
looked upon as an impediment to changing the college preparatory
component of the curriculum, for to make major changes may place at
risk high-
school graduates seeking university admission. But many
universities are willing to consider modifying their admission
criteria to accommodate
school districts, or at least to collaborate with them in
systematically trying out proposed changes and introducing them
over time if all goes well.
Indeed, claimed barriers to curriculum change may turn out to be
more an excuse for inaction than a reality. Identifying constraints
specificallyas
in We want X but are constrained by Ycan help to focus a
design
argument, as in Do we give up on X or try to eliminate Y?
Another mechanism for dealing with constraints is to build into
the design a process for ameliorating them after the designed
curriculum has been
implemented. If, for instance, a school district lacks the
technological capabilities called for by a proposed design, then
instead of abandoning the
design entirely, it may make sense to include a plan for
technological modernization as part of the design, with an
understanding that the new
curriculum will be implemented in stages as the school districts
technological capacity grows. In short, as design proceeds, some
adjustment of
learning goals may become necessary to accommodate constraints
that cannot be gotten around, just as some constraints can be
modified. Clarifying
the specifications for both goals and constraints throughout the
entire design process raises the likelihood that the ends and means
of the final design
will be in accord.
