INTERLINK Curriculum Guide

5. Basic Tenets

First and foremost, a curriculum is a tool which teachers use to provide students with what they need. The term "need" encompasses factors influencing students' conceptions of themselves as successful learners as well as the skills they require to turn incipient ideas into communicative products others can appreciate and understand. To accommodate the varying needs of a diverse body of students, a curriculum must provide structure and a framework for achieving desired outcomes. It should NOT, however, be a recipe book demanding absolute adherence to a rigid set of instructions and ingredients.

This curriculum has been designed with the idea of giving teachers as much freedom as possible in shaping classes around their students' needs and their own teaching styles. A curriculum which fails to foster such freedoms or actively impedes them is counterproductive and detrimental to learning. A staff member once expressed the conflict between student needs and curriculum demands in this way:

"…so much must be plowed through each term. They (teachers) do not have time to address students' needs because that often means departing from the curriculum, a time luxury they cannot afford."

The needs of the student should not be subjugated to the demands of the curriculum. In fact, the primary curricular goal should be to assure that student needs are met, and a curriculum that is at odds with accomplishing those needs is worse than useless. Teachers preoccupied with covering designated material on a set schedule are like engineers so intent on getting their trains to their destinations on time that they fail to notice if the passengers have managed to get on board. The trick is to get the passengers, not just the train, to the depot. This curriculum seeks to re-establish the student as the main focal point of the classroom. It does so by constructing the track on which classes travel from projects and activities which integrate skills and promote whole language development. Focus on the student rather than on what materials must be presented or what chapters of a designated textbook must be covered is a basic principle of this curriculum. Our orientation is humanistic rather than mechanistic and our primary interest is in what is received rather than in what is given. What the students do in class is more important than what information the teacher presents.

The expression "student needs" has been used here extensively to define what should be addressed in class, but as the following questions asked at a staff meeting demonstrate, further examination of the phrase and concept are in order:

"If a student perceives that his/her needs include more grammar exercises and explanations, etc., why do we not give them more grammar and agree that it's 'needs-based'? Why do we give them what we think they need? Who decides the needs, the student or the teacher?"

Just as a conscientious parent does not give a child a diet consisting exclusively of candy, chocolate and soda, although the child may crave it, a conscientious teacher does not supply what students "want" but what they "need" -- and there may be a world of difference between the two. The parent has a wider knowledge of life and is in a better position than the child to know about which foods are helpful and which harmful. The professional ESL teacher, likewise, having spent years studying and thinking about issues relating to language and learning, should be in a much better position than the students themselves to know what their real needs are. Those determinations are made by careful diagnosis of students' language use and interaction. As expressed in the Curriculum Statement, the premise of our program is that students gain proficiency not as a result of learning about language (grammar rules and explanations) but through active language use. If we provide students with what they want rather than what benefits them, we are like a parent who raises a child on junk food or a doctor who gives patients harmful drugs because they are requested. Just as student-centered means making the student the primary concern in the class and not "doing whatever the students want," so needs-based means addressing needs based on our professional judgment and not on students perceptions.

In attuning ourselves to student needs, we try to avoid giving students more and more of what they do not need and attempt to supply them with as much as possible of what they do need. In order to accomplish this task, we rely on the expertise of our teachers rather than the (literally!) off-the-shelf solutions provided by textbook publishers. We use textbooks freely, but the content of a course is never to be equated with the use of a particular textbook. Our teaching is customized around our students and not dictated by the materials we happen to use. The tail should not wag the dog.

Just as textbooks and curriculum requirements to cover certain material should not get in the way of students as they work toward greater linguistic independence and language proficiency, so must the teacher take a subordinate role in the classroom and be a supporting player rather than the main actor. The teacher should stand aside as much as possible and allow students to take center stage. Students can become dependent on a teacher that always provides information and correction, so the teacher should allow students to do as much as possible on their own. What students can do by themselves, the teacher should not do.

Teaching at INTERLINK strives to be holistic in two ways: it focuses on the student as a whole person and is concerned with whole language use. The whole is greater than its parts and whole language proficiency does not result from accumulating discrete pieces. In a game of chess, the taking of as many of the opponent's pieces as possible may be useful but is not necessary to the ultimate goal of achieving checkmate. Preoccupation with taking pieces could even distract a player from the main goal and result in defeat. The ultimate goals of the INTERLINK student are linguistic proficiency, cross-cultural maturity and academic readiness. Developing discrete skills in areas such as grammar and vocabulary may prove helpful in achieving those goals, but preoccupation with them can result in neglect of the larger goals and likewise end in failure. The aim of this curriculum is to keep students and teachers focused on the larger goals.

The key to focusing on the larger goals is a comprehensive structure for classes based on activities performed by students rather than on presentations made by teachers. Such a structure is provided by the basic constituents used inside and outside of the classroom to achieve maximum linguistic development and assure that minimal competencies are attained in each level:

· Core Projects - the major components of each class, provide the thematic threads that bind activities together
· Benchmarks - the measurable competencies established for each level

Each of these mechanisms is explained in detail in other sections, but it should be clear that these mechanisms are provided to help teachers apply the principles that are the central part of the curriculum to classroom practice.