Student CENTREDNESS
6. The Support Teachers Need
If the ideals of a student-centred curriculum were to become a reality, teachers would need assistance and support in several areas. As Bartlett and Butler (1985) have indicated, several problem areas seem to be of particular interest:
Needs Assessment Skills
Teachers require instruments and processes by which they can efficiently gather and prioritise student needs.
Course Guidelines
Teachers need a broader framework within which they can negotiate the curriculum. They need to know what the students have done before and what will come after in a form that does not stifle the negotiated curriculum. Minimum competences that are required by universities must be defined as thoroughly as possible (for exit competences see Chapter 3.3: Competences as Learning Objectives).
Course Planning Skills
Teachers need better planning skills that help them to negotiate a coherent, achievable set of objectives for a course, and then to plan a sequence of lessons to assist the students to attain the objectives.
Bilingual Help in Negotiating the Curriculum
The information exchange that is so crucial to a negotiated curriculum requires bilingual assistance in many classes.
Continuity in the Programme
The needs-based model can easily give rise to a fragmented programme. Some teachers are caught in this bind and are asking for some form of programme management to help them lead their students on a direct path to their goals. ”Model-courses” that give an idea of where to go in a course could be one way to solve that problem.
Educational Counselling
In a needs-based model the size of the problem that confronts any individual teacher is directly related to the range and diversity of the students’ needs. Teachers report that to negotiate the curriculum becomes an impossible project if the students’ needs are very diverse. This is a key area where the teacher’s stress can be reduced by forming a class group with a narrow range of needs. This requires the most efficacious use of educational counsellors who may be curriculum developers themselves, and who can direct students on a continuing basis into groups that match their needs. As far as CHAGAL students are concerned, different ways of grouping should be taken into consideration and alternative ways of differentiating with individualised teaching must be developed.
Conflict Resolution
Opening up the curriculum to negotiation will inevitably lead to instances of conflict. Teachers reported in a survey that such conflict had arisen, but many of them had found suitable processes for resolving it.
Teacher Role Specifications
The task of continually negotiating the curriculum with the students puts enormous strain on the teachers as is clearly evidenced in the relevant literature (see also Chapter 2: Student Situation Analysis).
