The secondary school curriculum has its own architecture. Although there are variations from province to province, from district to district, and from school to school, there is a common underlying structure which has evolved over time, modified by renovations and additions - and the occasional demolition.

The secondary curriculum is based on the following assumptions:

• There is a fixed time schedule of learning.
• Programs are collections of subjects, academic disciplines and some other areas.
• Time is the basic measure of importance; more important subjects are given more time; credit "weighting" is a function of time allotted.
• Time is not a variable for the learner.
• Class attendance is a necessary condition for learning.
• Group instruction is the dominant mode of teaching and learning.
• Some areas of learning are properly "curricular" and some areas of learning are "extra-curricular."
• Curriculum is largely "a given," determined by disciplinary traditions, admission policies of post-secondary institutions, government requirements, teachers’ background and examination priorities.
• Teachers are subject specialists.
• Certification and reporting are based on marks and marks are based on tests and assignments.

The secondary school curriculum has three dimensions:

1. Content knowledge arising from individual disciplines (such as English, mathematics, history, and science) and from certain interdisciplinary and non-academic areas (social studies, physical education, civics, personal development, and vocational training).

Skills (such as writing and problem solving) and attitudes (such as honesty, tolerance of differences) arise from our knowledge of literature, mathematics, science, and social studies. Content is largely shaped by the admission requirements of post-secondary college and university programs and some subjects (especially advanced mathematics and science) are high-stakes sorting devices by which students are categorized. This knowledge is what university-trained teachers in subject departments value and have been prepared to impart.

2. Student attitudes arising from the expansion of the population of young people served by schools, their increasing diversity in background, interests, abilities, and expectations, and the trend for youth to stay in school until graduation.

Responding to these needs, schools have expanded curricular and extra-curricular offerings to include attitudes and values such as respect for cultural diversity, conflict resolution, sexuality, health, social responsibility, self-respect and pride in religious and cultural identity. Knowledge and skills are shaped, given priority and selected under the influence of the attitudes, values, and belief systems of the school.

3. System skills arising from the more holistic and inter-disciplinary approaches found in evolving elementary and middle schools, from the pressures of government and business, the problems of school-work transitions, and other external forces.

Stress is placed on essential learnings, "generic" or "employability" or cross-curricular skills. These include leadership, communication, technological skills, thinking and problem solving, team work, adaptability, entrepreneurship and lifelong learning. Knowledge and attitudes are largely cast as "procedural" or process forms of learning to support competence and success.

It is the high school student who must meet the different demands of each of the three dimensions, balance their pressures, and integrate what they offer. If content knowledge, student attitudes and system skills in fact represent three unrelated curricula, the student is left to pick and choose, integrate and balance. Or not.

The school can help in how it designs its programs, how it demonstrates links among the dimensions, and how it uses each dimension to reinforce the others, keeping in mind the need to make the demands on the student relevant and reasonable.

It is helpful for a building to be based on some overall plan and for this plan to be rooted in some human and esthetic vision. A building is more than the individual preferences of the carpenters, plumbers, electricians, painters and suppliers. Different buildings are inspired by different plans and different visions. We would not want a single plan for every building, cathedral and shopping mall. Schools, too, need educational plans and visions as well as management and instruction.

A restructured school is more than a rearrangement of existing pieces.

There is a trend in many Canadian provinces to identify a number of key or essential areas of learning that usually cut across many or all curriculum subjects. These are variously called Graduation Expectations, Common Essential Learnings, Essential Graduation Learnings, Graduation Outcomes, Learning Profiles or Exit Profiles.

These are usually prepared by provincial or inter-provincial committees or by school or district communities. They arise from some common view of what high school graduates will require to function in the future, and the need to provide focus to the broad range of curriculum objectives arising from different subject areas.

These general steps are usually followed:

1. Identify a limited number of themes or areas

2. Give a general expression to the expectation

3. Break the expectation down into a number of elements

4. Analyze the elements

5. Apply expectations to different educational levels or developmental stages (e.g., benchmarks for senior high school or intermediate years)

6. Establish links with different subjects.

Graduation expectations are generally built around a short list of themes such as the following:

• Communication and literacy
• Numeracy
• Problem solving, critical and creative thinking
• Citizenship, interpersonal skills, personal and social values and skills
• Technological competence, computer literacy
• Skills and attitudes of lifelong learning
• Other areas such as personal development, aesthetic expression, or independent learning

These themes typically begin with a broad statement of the expectation. For example:

Communication: Graduates will be able to use the listening, viewing, speaking, reading and writing modes of language(s), and mathematical and scientific concepts and symbols, to think, learn, and communicate effectively.

Technological Competence: Graduates will be able to use a variety of technologies, demonstrate an understanding of technological applications, and apply appropriate technologies for solving problems.

Sometimes a longer list of twenty or more broad expectations is developed. These include items such as:

• Use mathematics to solve problems in business, science and daily life situations
• Can research an issue thoroughly
• Respect the cultural diversity of Canada and appreciate literature and the arts
• Demonstrate initiative, leadership, flexibility and persistence

These themes are divided into more specific elements:

• Explore, reflect on and express ideas, learnings, perceptions, feelings
• Understand facts and relationships in words, numbers, symbols, graphs, charts
• Present information and instructions clearly, logically, concisely, accurately
• Demonstrate knowledge of second official language
• Access, process, evaluate, share information
• Interpret, evaluate, express data in everyday language
• Reflect critically on and interpret ideas presented through different media

Technological competence:

It is then necessary to determine what benchmark of attainment is expected. "Understand and use existing and developing technologies" seems to suggest the need to:

• decide what technologies need to be understood and used (how many? what kind? spreadsheets? robots?)
• understand how a technology works (procedures? principles? technical specifications?)
• know how to use a technology (speed, accuracy, sophistication, creativity)
• be able to use the technology effectively and appropriately (who decides?)
• choose to use the technology (e.g. for assignments)
• be able to demonstrate the understanding and use of the technology (material produced, design, format).

This suggests an analysis of the knowledge, skills and attitudes involved and a set of choices to be made about content and standard of performance. We may be able to use many more technologies (e.g. spreadsheets) than we understand; we may understand the principles (search engines) but not be able to us them effectively to find sites; we may know how to use a technology but not want to use it (preferring to write longhand rather than use a word-processing program).

As we move from the level of curriculum policy to the level of the student and teacher, and from graduation level at the end of secondary school to earlier stages (intermediate years, upper and lower elementary school), we need to know (a) what content and benchmarks are appropriate for the level and (b) how a learner will satisfy in quality and quantity the expectation of the program.

• How much is enough? WordPerfect and Microsoft Word for Windows? Word-processing and spreadsheets? CAD systems? Databases? HTML?
• Does it matter what? Any word-processing system? Choice of database or spreadsheet?
• Does it matter when? Should elementary and middle school students have the chance to meet all the expectations (e.g. in technology) if they so wish and can?
• How is it demonstrated? Test? Production?
• How good does the attainment have to be? What is a minimum level?
• What happens to students who are "lagging behind" in meeting certain expectations?
• Does it matter where and how the learner meets the expectations (e.g. through extracurricular activities, independent initiative, previous experience)?

We now have the beginnings of a curriculum grid, with the cross-curricular expectations along one dimension and the major subject areas listed along the other dimension. These areas usually are: English language arts, second languages, social studies, fine arts, mathematics, physical science, technology, physical education, health, life skills, vocational and career courses.

Some expectations are identified with a cluster of subjects. For instance, "Understand the physical world, ecology and the diversity of life" would be primarily identified with science and mathematics, but would also involve the arts and technology and some aspects of social science. "Understand Canada’s political, social and economic systems within a global context" would be primarily dealt with in the social sciences, while "write and speak clearly, accurately and appropriately for the context" would be primarily the concern of language arts and second language, but also the concern of all other areas.

Other cross-curricular expectations are truly cross-curricular. Consider the following:

• Have the desire and realize the need for lifelong learning
• Evaluate their own endeavours and continually strive to improve
• Know how to work independently and as part of a team
• Identify, describe and interpret different points of view and distinguish fact from opinion
• Reflect critically on ethical issues.

The links between theoretical learning expectations and actual student learning involve (1) planning the curriculum and (2) organizing learning resources, services and activities.

Schools want their students to achieve (a) cross-curricular skills like thinking, (b) content knowledge in individual disciplines, and (c) personal/social development and values. This means organizing the curriculum into units.

We have always organized the high school curriculum into units of different sorts. We divide a student’s program into subjects like English and physical education, we give relative importance to each subject unit, and we translate this importance into the amount of time allocated to the subject on a schedule and the regulations about selectivity and entry.

English and mathematics are offered more frequently in most time-tables than fine arts and career planning. In some programs, a second language is selective in who is admitted and in other programs it is required of everyone. History is usually important but other social sciences like economics less so.

Within subjects, someone decides how many weeks we will spend on "The Novel" or "Acids, Bases and Salts" or "Badminton" or "Greece and Rome." or "Polynomials." Sometimes this is explicit in how provincial guidelines or (more important) external examinations weight subjects and elements within subjects; sometimes it is implicit in how an individual teacher "covers" topics in a curriculum.

We may think of curriculum in different ways:

• as a set of a limited number of courses or subject units: English, French, math, science, social studies, physical education, music, art, technology, personal and social development, etc. A student "does" or "takes" these courses.
• as a larger set of learning units organized in different patterns, some according to a discipline (history) some in an inter-disciplinary pattern (social studies, the environment), and some around a specific topic or skill (career preparation, women novelists, sustainable development, home construction, research methods, critical thinking, etc.).

We may re-design the curriculum in four ways:

1. by reorganizing units within a course
2. by reorganizing units in two or more courses in a coordinated or uncoordinated way (the Middle Ages: lifestyle, art, music, religion, politics, war)
3. by creating units that could either stand alone or "fit" into two or more courses (e.g., a unit on research skills, laboratory/workshop safety, comparative religion or French and English playwrights)
4. by reorganizing units across the whole curriculum of a year (grade 12) or level (foundation, intermediate, or middle school years).

There are many ways of organizing curriculum units, depending on our goals, our students, and our own imagination. But there are some general points worth considering:

A unit should have a natural coherence.

It could be based either on a culminating outcome (program a robotic arm to arrange three blocks in a specific pattern, give a persuasive speech arguing for capital punishment) or an area of knowledge (the Second World War, water as a resource, metaphor in language and thinking) or a combination of performance outcome and content (preparing a résumé and job application in French, preparing a multimedia presentation on the solar system for elementary school students, writing an essay on the significance of the writings of Mavis Gallant).

A unit should have a context.

It should fit into an existing course or program (an introduction to how to read statistics) or it could be an independent element (learning to use problem-solving software). But it should link somehow to other areas of learning and development, in the program or in the personal interests of a student.

A unit should have boundaries.

It should have a clearly defined scope and importance (one of fifteen units in a course), a suggested duration (approximately 10 hours of work), and an outcome (a summative evaluation or product).

A unit should be appealing and relevant to the learner.

A learning unit should be "marketed" to the learner, either on the basis of its usefulness (these exercises will improve your tennis game), or importance (we can’t really appreciate art without knowing something about it), or pleasure (you will share in the mystery of how a scientist makes a discovery.)

A unit should have a title that is appealing and revealing.

How we divide a course into units illustrates how we think of our subject, how we see the basic structure of our discipline or field.

An art course may be divided into units like: Drawing 1, Drawing II, Printing I, Printing II, Printmaking I, etc. Or it may be divided into units like: Drawing style, editorial cartoons as language, compositions that work and don’t work, computer animation, etc.

A history course may be divided chronologically into units: pre-history, early civilizations, Greece, Rome, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Reformation, Modern Europe. The units might be organized thematically: Three Explorations (Odyssey, Marco Polo, Lasalle), Imperial Cities (Babylon, Rome, London), The Technology of Killing (sword, gun, bomb), How Geography Shapes History (Tibet, Poland, Japan), etc. Or they might be a mix of introductory units, specialized topics, and broad integrating themes (individual rights, religious tolerance, technology).

English may be divided into units by genre (novel, short fiction, poetry, drama) and skill (journal writing, debating). There might be a semester course on writing with units on: a literary magazine, an ad campaign, a television script, a web site, a newspaper column, the first chapter of a novel, a political speech.

A technology course may be divided into a number of units that cover all the technology aspects of a set of cross-curricular expectations: understanding the role and impact of technology in our society, basic principles of key technologies, competence in various communications technologies, the contribution of technology to scientific development, and ethical issues related to technology.

There are some key units that can apply to more than one curriculum area: report writing in English, French and social studies; preparing a portfolio in art and writing; understanding basic statistics in mathematics, physical and social sciences; study skills in all subjects; problem solving and creative thinking methods in current events, technology, mathematics and science; basic health in physical education and biology; design in art, history, technology; information accessing and processing in many subjects; writing skills in languages and career programs; public speaking and presentation techniques in many subjects.

Such units could be prepared in collaboration with the teachers involved and be integrated into or considered pre-requisites for different subject areas. The teacher teams would also likely be involved in periodic revisions and in assessment standards and procedures.

Independent or floating units are those prepared by one or more teachers but do not form part of any program or course. They may arise out of the interests of individual teachers (the mathematics of music, the nature of myth, the definition of poverty, learning from elders) or they may arise from the special needs or interests of a group of students (Aboriginal music, dealing with death, conflict resolution, childbirth).

A school may have as part of its mission to sensitize students to lifelong learning. Part of doing this could involve such "free" or "voluntary" units or learning experiences that do not necessarily contribute to the total "credit requirements" for a diploma. Such units might also be used as free or elective units in certain programs with the permission of a teacher.

A school, however, may decide to begin a complete redesign of its program "across the board," involving the total curriculum of a year or level. If it chooses to move from a traditional time- and credit-based curriculum to one based on outcomes or standards, the school obviously needs a more elaborate and prolonged process of curriculum development than would be needed for a less ambitious adjustment.

This process would involve:

• Careful analysis of graduation outcomes and content priorities and their applications to different aspects of the school curriculum
• Consultation and discussion among staff about priorities and the relative importance of different curriculum areas
• Development of an overall plan or protocol on the total number of units in a student’s program and their distribution across curriculum areas
• Consultations with experts, community representatives, parents and students about priorities, outcomes, standards and resources
• Development and testing of a map of units for the whole curriculum
• Development and testing of learner guides for key units
• Critical path of pilot testing, phasing in and evaluation.

There is a danger that in our focus on dividing programs and courses into small units, we will lose sight of the whole, the broader themes that are woven through large areas of learning, the culminating achievements that are greater than the sum of the parts. A musical composition is more than a collection of notes, a painting more than units on color, space, perspective, and line drawing, a historical understanding of market economies more than some units on separate economic movements.

It is important to ensure that learners keep a vision of the whole and understand the parts in relation to broader and bigger pictures. This can be done in two ways:

• by linking each unit to the overall expectations and outcomes of a program and to other units, using, for example, a visual map of the program and where this unit fits in.
• by building some introductory and concluding units, the former introducing the learner to the broad pattern (e.g. building a house, contemporary Canada, the systems of the human body), the latter providing culminating experiences requiring synthesis and evaluation of the key issues and themes (how form follows function, the links between politics and economics in NAFTA, the survival theme in Canadian literature).

These are means of respecting the integrity of programs.