The Models of Bobbitt and Charters

Franklin Bobbitt compared creating a curriculum to constructing a railroad: Once the general route is
planned, the builder engages in surveying and then the laying of track. Developing a curriculum is
like planning a person’s route to growth, culture, and that individual’s special abil-ities.18 Like a
railroad engineer, an educator must “take a broad over-view of the entire field [and see] the major
factors in perspective and in relation.” A general plan for the educational pro-gram can then be
formulated, followed by “determining content and experiences necessary for the [learner].”19 Even
today, many educators believe that curriculum development must include some means of
monitoring and managing learning; that is, students’ interactions with specific contents. Such
monitoring enables an effective structure of curriculum and instruction.20

For Bobbitt, the first task of curriculum development is to “discover the activities which ought to
make up the lives of students and along with these, the abilities and personal qualities necessary for
proper performance.”21 Bobbitt believed that education in the new 20th century had to strive to
develop a type of wisdom that could result only by participating in actual life situa-tions. Such
situations would nurture in students’ specific judgments and thought.22 Education’s purpose was to
prepare students effectively to be competent participants in life, particularly to engage in specific
activities that would contribute to society, the economy, and family life. He argued in his writings
that prior to the 20th century, creating curricula, creating educational opportunities, was not
carefully thought through. To create a meaningful educational experience, we needed a scientific
technique to determine curricula requisite for educating students in spe-cific activities necessary for
a productive life that contributed to the overall society.23 All human experiences needed to be
considered when contemplating developing curricula. What Bobbitt advocated still has value today.
This approach continues in various types of task analysis.24 It shares features of what some
educators call backward design.25

Bobbitt’s contemporary Werrett Charters also believed in activity analysis. However, Charters noted
that “changes in the curriculum are always preceded by modifications in our conception of the aim
of education.”26 Our aims (ideals) influence the selection of school con-tent and experiences.
Charters wanted educators to connect aims with activities that individu-als performed. He advocated
four steps of curriculum construction: “(1) selecting objectives, (2) dividing them into ideals and
activities, (3) analyzing them to the limits of working units, and (4) collecting methods of
achievement.”27

For Charters, philosophy supplied the ideals that were to serve as objectives and standards. He
noted that the curriculum could contain both primary and derived subjects. Primary subjects were
those directly required by a particular occupation. For example, a meteorologist must fill out various
types of reports. Therefore, report writing is a primary subject for all students to experience in
English classes. Meteorology requires a knowledge of physics and mathematics, which are derived
subjects, “service subjects which are important not because they are directly

seful in the performance of activities, but because they are derived from material which has practical
service value.”28

Bobbitt and Charters firmly established scientific curriculum making. They saw effective curriculum
development as a process that results in a meaningful program. Bobbitt and Charters initiated a
concern for the relationships among goals, objectives, and activities. They regarded goal selection as
a normative process and the selection of objectives and activities as empirical and scientific. Bobbitt
and Charters indicated that curricular activity can be planned and system-atically studied and
evaluated.

The field of curriculum achieved independent status with the 1932 establishment of the Society for
Curriculum Study. In 1938, Teachers College at Columbia University established a department of
curriculum and teaching. For the next 20 years, Teachers College dominated the field of curriculum;
its influence even surpassed the earlier influence of the University of Chicago.

RANKLIN BOBBITT (1876-1956)

 Curriculum should start with outlining what the student needs to know (objectives)
 Next it was necessary to develop activities that the students do to achieve the objective.
 Emphasized having students complete activities in order to learning.
 Heavily influenced by behaviorism with their focus on observable change.
 Brought this idea of observable change into education in his development of objectives.
 Developed guidelines for developing objective (see below):-
 Objectives should be practical
 Objectives should prepare students for adulthood
 Involve the community in developing objectives
 Sequence objectives by grade level

BOBBITT & CHARTERS

 Introduced the idea of objectives. The concept of objectives would blossom into goals,
aims, standards, learning outcomes, indicators, and benchmarks.
 Introduced the idea of learning experiences. These are the things the students do to
learn. Again this led to such concepts as experiential learning, hands-on activities, authentic
assessment, and more. Action-based learning is the norm today.
 Bobbitt and Charters were some of the first proponents of consulting the community in
developing curriculum. In other words, a needs assessment was necessary before determining
what to teach. Consulting stakeholders is now considered best practice in education.

Social Efficiency Movement

Bobbitt along with a handful of other early-twentieth-century educators, including W. W.
Charters, Ross L. Finney, Charles C. Peters, and David Snedden, gave life to what has come
to be called the social efficiency movement in education. The schools, for these individuals,
were a key institution in dealing with the disruptions and dislocations in American life that
they associated with the nation's late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century transformation
into an urban, industrial society. The purpose of education, they argued, was to prepare youth
for the specific work and citizenship roles, which they would hold when they reached
adulthood, and in so doing render society more orderly and stable. The test for the schools
and its program, as these thinkers saw it, was its utility in fulfilling this social purpose.
Bobbitt's Contribution
Bobbitt's legacy falls into four areas. First, he was one of the first American educators to
advance the case for the identification of objectives as the starting point for curriculum
making. He, along with the authors of the National Education Association's Cardinal
Principles of Secondary Education, argued that the content of the curriculum was not self-
evident in the traditional disciplines of knowledge, but had to be derived from objectives that
addressed the functions of adult work and citizenship. Education was not important in its own
right for Bobbitt. Its value lay in the preparation it offered children for their lives as adults.
Second, his so-called scientific approach to curriculum making served as a precedent for the
work of numerous educators during the next half-century in spelling out the procedures for
designing the course of study. It was a method that became and has remained the
conventional wisdom among American educators concerning the process of curriculum
development.

Third, Bobbitt along with other early-twentieth-century efficiency-oriented school reformers

made the case that the curriculum ought to be differentiated into numerous programs, some
academic and preparatory and others vocational and terminal, and that students ought to be
channeled to these tracks on the basis their abilities. His work lent credence to efforts to
vocationalize the curriculum, and provided legitimacy to what has become one of the most
questionable features of the modern school curriculum, the practices of tracking and ability
grouping. Finally, Bobbitt was one of the first American educators to define the curriculum as
an instrument of social control or regulation for addressing the problems of modern society.
True to the ideals of social efficiency, he saw the task of the schools as that of instilling in
youth the skills, knowledge, and beliefs that they required to function in the urban, industrial,
and increasingly heterogeneous society that America was becoming during the early years of
the twentieth century.

Curriculum Development: The Tyler Model

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The Tyler Model, developed by Ralph Tyler in the 1940’s, is the quintessential prototype of
curriculum development in the scientific approach. One could almost dare to say that every
certified teacher in America and maybe beyond has developed curriculum either directly or
indirectly using this model or one of the many variations.

Tyler did not intend for his contribution to curriculum to be a lockstep model for development.
Originally, he wrote down his ideas in a book Basic Principles of Curriculum and
Instruction for his students to give them an idea about principles for to making
curriculum. The brilliance of Tyler’s model is that it was one of the first models and it was
and still is a highly simple model consisting of four steps.

1. Determine the school’s purposes (aka objectives)

2. Identify educational experiences related to purpose
3. Organize the experiences
4. Evaluate the purposes
Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction

Step one is determining the objectives of the school or class. In other words, what do the
students need to do in order to be successful? Each subject has natural objectives that are
indicators of mastery. All objectives need to be consistent with the philosophy of the school
and this is often neglected in curriculum development. For example, a school that is
developing an English curriculum may create an objective that students will write essays.
This would be one of many objectives within the curriculum.

Step two is developing learning experiences that help the students to achieve step one. For
example, if students need to meet the objective of writing an essay. The learning experience
might be a demonstration by the teacher of writing an essay. The students than might
practice writing essays. The experience (essay demonstration and writing) is consistent with
the objective (Student will write an essay).

Step three is organizing the experiences. Should the teacher demonstrate first or should the
students learn by writing immediately? Either way could work and preference is determined
by the philosophy of the teacher and the needs of the students. The point is that the teacher
needs to determine a logical order of experiences for the students.

Lastly, step four is evaluation of the objectives. Now the teacher assesses the students’
ability to write an essay. There are many ways to do this. For example, the teacher could
have the students write an essay without assistance. If they can do this, it is evidence that
the students have achieved the objective of the lesson.

There are variations on this model. However, the Tyler model is still considered by many to
be the strongest model for curriculum development.

Curriculum Design Models

There are a variety of curriculum design models to guide the process. Most of the designs
are based on Ralph Tyler’s work which emphasizes the role and place of objectives in
curriculum design.

Ralph Tyler’s Model

Tyler’s Model (1949) is based on the following four (4) fundamental questions he posed for
guiding the curriculum design process. They are as follows:

What educational purposes is the school seeking to attain?

What educational experiences are potentially provided that are likely to attain these
purposes?

How can these educational experiences be effectively organized?

How can we determine whether these purposes are being attained?

Schematically, Tyler’s model is presented as follows.

Flowchart depicting Ralph Tyler's curriculum design model

Figure 5.1 – Ralph Tyler’s Model

Application of Ralph Tyler’s Model in Curriculum Design

In applying Tyler’s model to curriculum design, the process begins with framing objectives
for the curriculum. Because of its emphasis on the importance of objectives, it is considered
an objective-based model. This process starts with analyzing information from various data
sources. Data sources for curriculum according to Tyler include:

Contemporary society/life

For this source, the designer analyzes the issues affecting society that could be solved
through education.

Examples are cultural issues, socio-economic issues, and health issues such as HIV/AIDS
among.

Learner’s needs and interests

Subject specialists/subject matter

From these sources, the designer develops general objectives. These are subjected to a
screening process, using the philosophy of education and psychology of learning as the
major screens. Social values are also used as a screen, but sometimes these are subsumed
in the philosophy of education. This yields a feasible number of objectives that are focused
on in education.

Specific objectives are then derived from the general objectives. For each of the specific
objectives, learning experiences are identified. In this context, the learning experiences
include the subject matter/content and learning activities.

The next step is the organization of learning experiences. This is done to ensure effective
learning takes place. The various principles of the organization include scope, sequence,
integration, and continuity, among others. The final step involves evaluation, to determine
the extent to which the objectives have been met.
Feedback from the evaluation is then used to modify the learning experiences and the entire
curriculum as found necessary.

Learning Experiences

Learning experiences refer to the interaction between the learner and the external conditions
in the environment which they encounter. Learning takes place through the active
participation of the students; it is what the students are involved in that they learn, not what
the teacher does.

The problem of selecting learning experiences is the problem of determining the kind of
experiences likely to produce given educational objectives and also the problem of how to
set up opportunity situations that evoke or provide within the student the kinds of learning
experiences desired.

General Principles in Selecting Learning Experiences

Provide experiences that give students opportunities to practice the behavior and deal with
the content implied.

Provide experiences that give satisfaction from carrying on the kind of behavior implied in
the objectives.

Provide experiences that are appropriate to the student’s present attainments, his/her
predispositions.

Keep in mind that many experiences can be used to attain the same educational objectives.

Remember that the same learning experience will usually bring about several outcomes.

Selection of Subject Matter/Content

The term subject matter/content refers to the data, concepts, generalizations, and principles
of school subjects such as mathematics, biology, or chemistry that are organized into bodies
of knowledge sometimes called disciplines. For instance, Ryman (1973) specifically defines
content as:

Knowledge such as facts, explanations, principles, definitions, skills, and processes such as
reading, writing, calculating, dancing, and values such as the beliefs about matters
concerned with good and bad, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly.

The selection of content and learning experiences is one crucial part of curriculum making.
This is mainly because of the explosion of knowledge that made the simplicity of school
subjects impossible. As specialized knowledge increases, it is necessary either to add more
subjects or to assign new priorities in the current offerings to make room for new knowledge
and new concepts.

New requirements for what constitute literacy have also emerged. In secondary schools, the
usual method of accommodating new demands is to introduce new subjects or to put new
units into existing subjects.

Improved educational technology such as the use of television, radio, computers, and multi-
media resources support an expansion of what can be learned in a given period. New
technological aids for self- teaching, for communicating information, and for learning a
variety of skills are shifting the balance of time and effort needed for acquiring a substantial
portion of the curriculum. What then are the criteria for the selection of content?

Criteria for the Selection of Content

Several criteria need to be considered in selecting content. These include the validity,
significance, needs, and interests of learners.

Validity

The term validity implies a close connection between content and the goals which it is
intended to serve. In this sense, content is valid if it promotes the outcomes that it is
intended to promote. In other words, does the curriculum include concepts and learnings that
it states it does?

Significance

The significance of curriculum content refers to the sustainability of the material chosen to
meet certain needs and ability levels of the learners.

Needs and Interests of the Learner

The needs and interests of the learners are considered in the selection of content to ensure
a relevant curriculum to the student’s world. This also ensures that the students will be more
motivated to engage with the curriculum.

Utility

In this context, the subject matter of a curriculum is selected in the light of its usefulness to
the learner in solving his/her problems now and in the future.
Learnability

Curriculum content is learnable and adaptable to the students’ experiences. One factor in
learnability is the adjustment of the curriculum content and the focus of learning experiences
on the abilities of the learners. For effective learning, the abilities of students must be taken
into account at every point of the selection and organization.

Consistency with Social Realities

If the curriculum is to be a useful prescription for learning, its content, and the outcomes it
pursues need to be in tune with the social and cultural realities of the culture and the times.