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Curriculum development glossary
30 terms from C11, Curriculum development: design, review and enactment — each defined in the primer's own words. Every term the primer teaches links to the slide that teaches it.
C11 · Curriculum and assessment
Curriculum development: design, review and enactment
“A syllabus is written once, then implemented.”
Every term below is defined in the words of curriculum development, primer C11 of understanding the context of education, and opens the primer at the slide where it is taught. 2 terms are also defined by another primer in the series; where the two differ, both wordings are given. The whole context glossary holds all of them together.
| Term | Definition | Referred to in | Read further |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | |||
| Approved Textbook List (SG) | Singapore's list of ministry-approved materials, drawn up to help principals and subject heads select suitable texts and updated in mid-August each year; commercial materials enter schools through it (Ministry of Education, n.d.-b). |
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| B | |||
| Between-cycle updates | Content added to a curriculum without waiting for its scheduled review, usually because the field moves faster than the cycle. Singapore added AI literacy to digital literacy work this way (Ministry of Education, 2025). |
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| C | |||
| Curriculum change management | The work of preparing schools for a change: sequencing, training, materials and communication. Covered in depth in primer C23 on education reform. |
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| Curriculum deliberation | Arguing a curriculum decision to a defensible conclusion: identifying the facts, generating alternatives, weighing costs and consequences, and choosing (Walker, 1971; Kessels & Plomp, 1996). |
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| Curriculum design | Deciding the aims, content, sequence, teaching approach and assessment of a course or subject. One stage of curriculum development, not a synonym for it. |
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| Curriculum development | The whole process by which a curriculum is scanned for, designed, trialled, rolled out, monitored and revised, including the version teachers make in classrooms. |
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| Curriculum evaluation | Judging the worth of a curriculum: whether it was taught, what it produced and what it displaced. Programme evaluation methods are covered in primer C22. |
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| Curriculum ideologies and orientations | Long-standing positions on what schooling is for, which drive most curriculum disputes. Schiro (2013) names four: Scholar Academic, Social Efficiency, Learner Centered and Social Reconstruction. |
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| Curriculum implementation | Putting a curriculum into practice. What counts as success depends on the perspective taken: fidelity, mutual adaptation or enactment (Snyder et al., 1992). |
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| Curriculum mapping | Setting out what is taught, where and when, across a programme or school. Covered in primer C10. C10 Recording what is actually taught, when and to what demand, so that gaps, repetitions and mismatches with assessment become visible. It is the practical tool for seeing the enacted curriculum. |
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| Cyclical models | Models such as Wheeler's (1967) and Nicholls and Nicholls's (1972) that keep the steps of the objectives tradition but close the loop, so evaluation feeds the next round. |
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| E | |||
| Educative curriculum materials | Materials intended to promote teacher learning in addition to student learning, designed to support teachers rather than merely to script them (Ball & Cohen, 1996; Davis & Krajcik, 2005). |
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| F | |||
| Fidelity, mutual adaptation and enactment | Three answers to when a curriculum is finished: at the developer's desk, in the negotiation with a school, or in the classroom with students (Fullan & Pomfret, 1977; McLaughlin, 1976; Snyder et al., 1992). |
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| I | |||
| Implementation monitoring | Finding out what is actually being taught, by observation, teacher report, work samples or materials audits, rather than counting distribution or attendance. |
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| N | |||
| Needs and environmental scans | Structured looks outward before a review: what has changed in the discipline, the economy, technology, society and the student population. |
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| O | |||
| Objectives model | A model that states the intended changes in students, which makes evaluation straightforward and coverage checkable. The tradition runs from Tyler (1949) through Taba (1962), whose seven steps begin with diagnosis of needs. |
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| P | |||
| Platform, deliberation and design | Walker's (1971) three phases of curriculum planning: the beliefs and images a group starts from, the arguing that follows, and the decisions that result. |
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| Process model | A model that specifies principles of procedure instead of outcomes: it states what the encounter should be like and leaves the outcomes open, which makes evaluation harder and teaching more demanding (Stenhouse, 1975). |
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| R | |||
| Resource development and syllabus alignment | Building textbooks, tasks, assessments and digital materials against a particular syllabus version, and updating them when that version is revised. |
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| Review and renewal cycles | The published rhythm on which a system reopens each subject. In Singapore, school subjects are reviewed about once every six to eight years (Ministry of Education, 2025). |
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| S | |||
| School-based curriculum development | Curriculum planned and made by a school for its own students, usually inside a national frame. Skilbeck (1984) is the standard account. |
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| Sense-making | Implementation seen as each actor understanding a new policy through what they already know, so the most common outcome of an ambitious reform is partial assimilation rather than refusal (Spillane et al., 2002). |
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| Sites of curriculum making | Curriculum making framed as intertwined sites of activity, supra, macro, meso, micro and nano, from international bodies to teachers with students, treated as types of activity rather than institutional functions (Priestley et al., 2021). |
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| Situational analysis | The first stage in Skilbeck's model: an analysis of external factors such as parental expectations and employer requirements, and internal ones such as teacher skills and resources (Wu, 2001). |
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| Stakeholder and industry consultation | Drawing employers, sector agencies, teachers, academics and parents into a review, so that scope and content answer to more than the writers' own view. |
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| Syllabus review | Reopening a syllabus on its cycle to decide what is kept, cut or rewritten. In Singapore this sits with the Curriculum Planning and Development Division (Ministry of Education, n.d.-a). |
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| Syllabus review committees | The groups convened to do that work, usually mixing ministry officers, subject specialists and teachers. Singapore's 1988 Mathematics Syllabus Review Committee is a documented example (Kaur, 2014). |
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| T | |||
| Teacher agency | Something teachers achieve in a setting rather than a matter of permission alone, shaped by what they bring, what the culture allows and what the structures make possible (Priestley et al., 2015). C05 Teachers acting with judgement to shape their work. In the ecological view, it is something teachers achieve in particular settings, not a fixed trait (Biesta et al., 2015; Priestley et al., 2015). |
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| Teacher as researcher | Stenhouse's (1975) proposal that teachers test curriculum proposals in their own classrooms, since a curriculum is a hypothesis rather than an instruction. |
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| Teachers as curriculum makers | The view that teachers do not merely deliver a curriculum but make the version students meet, through interpretation, sequencing and repair (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988; Clandinin & Connelly, 1992). |
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