Curriculum Planning and Educational Method: Post-Qualifying Courses

There was practically no discussion in the 1950s and early 1960s about how students learn, in addition to what they should be taught. A few courses held a post-mortem at the end when students were asked their views about the course. There was also discussion at examiners’ meetings about pass or fail standards, related to implicit or explicit judgements about what students should know and be able to do at the end of the course. Some change resulted from the professional as distinct from social studies courses because tutors had to think about the content of teaching in relation to its application in practice. Supervisors also had to be helped to learn how to teach. But it was not usual to start with objectives in planning the curriculum of a new course and then translate these into the theoretical and fieldwork content of the course, and test out the most effective learning experiences and educational methods to achieve the hoped-for results. By slow degrees and largely from empirical experience, elements of the psychology of learning, culled largely from gestalt psychology and stimulus response theories, began to be applied.