Learning standards set specific aims for each aspect of schooling
Learning Standards (LS) are the spine of the National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCF), that was released by India’s ministry of education on 23 August 2023. ‘Spine’ because the NCF is built around these Learning Standards, knitting all its elements together to form the whole.
Most importantly, these standards drive goal alignment in all these elements to enable consistency and coherence. Let us explore this in some detail in this column, the second in this series about the NCF.
This piece, like the others in this series, paraphrases text from the NCF copiously but retains fidelity to its spirit. To begin, a recap: The curriculum includes the syllabus, content, pedagogical practices and assessment, textbooks, teaching-learning-materials, school and classroom practices, the environment and culture of schools, and more.
The design and development of these elements are informed by a wide range of considerations, like educational psychology and neurosciences, subject knowledge of disciplines, experience and research in pedagogical practices, and the capacity and resources of our schools. Achieving coherence in this vast array of elements, ensuring they work in harmony, and toward the goals that we set for our education system, is one of the most fundamental challenges in education; especially in the design and development itself, much before the implementation.
This column doesn’t deal with issues related to implementation other than noting that good design and development, including accounting for practical considerations, is a necessary though not sufficient condition for effective practice and implementation in the real world. What are the Learning Standards and how do they bring about goal alignment? In
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