Basic principles of curriculum and instruction . If you have ever created a unit plan, or a series of complex, related lesson plans, you have probably already asked yourselves these or similar questions as a form of internal dialogue, or as an automatic, subliminal process, as you first elaborated and then refined your educational intentions and related educational directions. While Tyler's questions are certainly a good place to start developing curriculum, in light of what we now know about the complex journey of learning and how the human brain processes and retains information, there are additional questions that may help you create effective instructional plans and curriculum. Hopefully, these questions, in addition to Tyler's, will aid you in creating material that is both relevant and useful. In the context of students' future needs, be able to justify why you are teaching particular content or processes.
Good instruction needs to be multi-modal and holistic in order to be remembered.
In order to create effective curriculum and instructional designs, use Tyler's questions as a place to get started, and then use my questions as a way to monitor instructional relevany and applicability. Earlier I stated that instructional planning is both a divergent and convergent process. It is divergent in that from a single idea many related ideas can be generated. The divergent thinking processes as used in instructional planning is a form of brainstorming. Taking a central theme or idea you begin to diverge and think of related content, skills and processes that are reflective of the initial theme.