Two teachers have the same textbook chapter on the water cycle. One starts at page one: vocabulary list, diagram, worksheet, test on Friday. The other starts by asking what a pupil should be able to do by the end, such as explain why a puddle disappears on a warm day and a cold one lasts, then decides how she will find out whether they can, and only then picks the activities. The first teacher covered the chapter. The second planned for a result.
That difference, planning from the outcome backwards instead of from the page forwards, is the first habit of curriculum designers. The second is noticing that topics have an order that is not the order in the book, and the third is knowing how much help a learner needs at each moment. This piece is about those three habits and the long-running argument about the last one.
In 1949 Ralph Tyler, in Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction, asked four questions that are still the skeleton of the field: what purposes should the school try to achieve, what experiences will serve them, how can those experiences be organised, and how will we know the purposes were met? Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe's Understanding by Design (1998; second edition 2005) turned this into backward design in three stages: identify the desired results, decide what evidence would show them, and only then plan the learning. In higher education John Biggs (1996) called the same principle constructive alignment: the intended outcome, what students do, and how they are assessed must point at the same thing.
Misalignment is the commonest design failure and it is easy to miss. A teacher wants pupils to "design a fair test", teaches it by lecture, and gives a multiple-choice quiz. Everything is tidy and nothing connects. The tool below checks the three links.
Choose one of each. The check compares the kind of thinking each asks for, using Bloom's six levels from the next section.
Backward design has critics. A plan built entirely from what can be tested may shrink to what is easy to test, and some teachers argue that good lessons find their aims as they go. Wiggins and McTighe reply that the goals can be rich (their "big ideas" and "transfer" tasks) and that unplanned discoveries are welcome inside a planned frame.
A useful objective names something you could watch a learner do. Robert Mager's Preparing Instructional Objectives (1962) pushed the field toward verbs like "solve" and "list" rather than "appreciate" or "understand". In 1956 Benjamin Bloom and colleagues published a taxonomy of cognitive goals from knowledge up through comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl revised it in 2001 into two dimensions: a cognitive process (remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate, create) and a knowledge type (factual, conceptual, procedural, metacognitive). Its great use is to make a teacher ask "what kind of thinking is this question asking for?"
Treat the levels with care. They are not a strict staircase: a learner cannot analyse an argument without remembering what the words mean, which is the lesson of Learning Sciences (36/53), that knowledge is what thinking is made from. Calling recall "lower order" can lead to teaching skills in a vacuum. And the same stem can sit at different levels for different learners, since a problem already solved in class is memory the second time. The taxonomy is a tool for asking questions about a lesson, and its authors never claimed more.
Some topics need others first. Multiplication needs addition, division needs multiplication, fractions need division. Draw an arrow from each topic to what needs it and you have a graph, and a teacher's choices are the orders consistent with it. The number is much smaller than people expect. Robert Gagné called such maps learning hierarchies in the 1960s, and the practical point is that the expert's order, which follows the logic of the subject, is not always the learner's order.
Evidence that foundations matter comes from maths. Robert Siegler and colleagues (2012) used long-term data from the UK and the US and found that a ten-year-old's knowledge of fractions and division predicted algebra and overall maths achievement at sixteen, even after accounting for IQ, family income and other early maths skills. Jerome Bruner (The Process of Education, 1960) added the idea of a spiral curriculum: return to the central ideas again and again at increasing depth, rather than teach each once.
Tap the topics in the order you would teach them. A topic only goes in when what it needs is already in.
Needs: place value needs number sense; addition needs number sense; multiplication needs addition; division needs multiplication; fractions need division; decimals need place value and fractions; percent needs fractions and decimals. The prerequisite map is a simplified teaching example. Real maps are larger and some links are debated.
From Learning Sciences (36/53): a beginner's working memory is swamped by solving a problem from scratch, so studying a solved example teaches more. But an expert needs less help, so help should shrink as skill grows. Fading does this: first a fully worked example, then the same kind of problem with the last step left for the learner, then the last two, and finally the whole problem. Alexander Renkl and Robert Atkinson (2003) found that fading beat both complete examples and plain problem-solving in several studies. Michelene Chi's work (1989) found that students who explained examples to themselves, step by step, learned more.
The longest dispute in the field is over how much to tell learners and how much to let them find out. Each side has a strong case.
| Side | Its case |
|---|---|
| Explicit instruction | Kirschner, Sweller and Clark (2006) argued that unguided or minimally guided teaching ignores the limits of working memory and that decades of evidence favour worked examples and direct explanation for novices. Barak Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction (2012) draws ten practices, such as small steps, checking understanding and many examples, from research on effective teachers. In Project Follow Through (US, 1968 to 1977, the largest experiment in education), the Direct Instruction model scored best on basic skills, though critics questioned how the results were analysed. |
| Inquiry and problem-based | Hmelo-Silver, Duncan and Chinn (2007) replied that real problem-based and inquiry lessons are heavily scaffolded, so the critique targets a straw man. Manu Kapur's "productive failure" work has found that struggling on a hard problem before being taught can build deeper understanding than being taught first, at least for some concepts. Montessori schools and Reggio Emilia (founded by Loris Malaguzzi in post-war Italy) are built on child-led exploration with a prepared environment. |
| What the meta-analyses say | Alfieri and colleagues (2011), pooling 164 studies, found that unassisted discovery did worse than explicit instruction, while discovery with guidance (feedback, worked examples, prompts) did better. That supports both camps on their own terms, and shows the live disagreement is about how much and when. |
A common reading is that novices need more explicit guidance, advanced learners can handle more openness, and "discovery" is only good when carefully designed. This is a summary of the research, and people on both sides would phrase it differently. Where the dispute meets values (what school is for, whether to treat children as explorers or apprentices) the evidence cannot settle it.
International comparisons such as TIMSS distinguish three curricula: the intended one written in law, the implemented one a teacher delivers, and the attained one pupils actually learn. They are never the same, and good design plans for the gaps.
| Place | How the curriculum is set |
|---|---|
| England | A national curriculum since the 1988 Education Reform Act, revised in 2014, with schools free to add to it. |
| Japan | The ministry's Courses of Study, revised about every ten years. Teachers also practise jugyō kenkyū (lesson study): small groups plan a lesson, one teaches it while others observe, and they revise it. Stigler and Hiebert's The Teaching Gap (1999) spread the idea abroad. |
| Singapore | A national syllabus from the Ministry of Education; its "Teach Less, Learn More" campaign (from 2005) aimed at less content and more depth. |
| India | The National Education Policy 2020 replaced the 10+2 pattern with 5+3+3+4 stages (foundational, preparatory, middle, secondary) and recommends mother-tongue teaching at least to grade 5. |
| Kenya | A competency-based curriculum from 2017, replacing the 8-4-4 system of 1985 with a 2-6-3-3-3 structure; its first cohort moved into junior secondary in 2023, and readiness and cost have been debated. |
| United States | Standards are set by states. The Common Core (2010) was adopted by most states, and several later revised or replaced it. |
The structures differ, the problem is the same: what goes in, what comes out, and who has a say. Finland's reforms, like the 2016 national core curriculum asking schools to run multidisciplinary modules, show how a system can set aims and leave method to teachers.
Design a course backward: decide what learners must be able to do, choose evidence for it, then plan the practice, keeping the three aligned. Order topics by what they need, give help to beginners and take it away as they improve, and remember that what is written, what is taught and what is learned are three different curricula.
Try this: take any lesson, tutorial or recipe you have used. Write its goal in one sentence with a verb you could watch, then note what was practised and what was tested. Do all three match?
Sources. Tyler, Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction (1949); Wiggins and McTighe, Understanding by Design (1998; 2005); Biggs, Higher Education 1996; Mager 1962; Bloom et al. 1956; Anderson and Krathwohl 2001; Gagné, The Conditions of Learning (1965); Bruner 1960; Siegler et al., Psychological Science 2012; Renkl and Atkinson, Educational Psychologist 2003; Chi, Bassok, Lewis, Reimann and Glaser, Cognitive Science 1989; Kirschner, Sweller and Clark, Educational Psychologist 2006; Hmelo-Silver, Duncan and Chinn, Educational Psychologist 2007; Alfieri, Brooks, Aldrich and Tenenbaum, Journal of Educational Psychology 2011; Kapur on productive failure (2008 onward); Rosenshine, American Educator 2012; Project Follow Through evaluations (Abt Associates 1977; House et al. 1978); Stigler and Hiebert 1999; IEA TIMSS curriculum model; India NEP 2020 (Union Cabinet, 29 July 2020); Kenya CBC rollout reports (2017 to 2023); Finnish National Agency for Education core curriculum 2014. The prerequisite count and all numbers in the interactives were computed in node. This piece describes research and policy and takes no side on contested values.