Essential Educational Terminology and Definitions
Ability (Capacidad)
This can be interpreted as the potential or aptitude inherent in every person to acquire new knowledge and skills.
Active Learning
A process whereby learners are actively engaged in the learning process, rather than passively absorbing lectures. Active learning involves reading, writing, discussion, and engagement in solving problems, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Active learning often involves cooperative learning.
Aims and Objectives
These express the purpose of the educational unit or course; they are also a statement of a goal which successful participants are expected demonstrably to achieve before the course or unit completes.
Assessment
The process of documenting, usually in measurable terms, knowledge, skills, attitudes, and beliefs.
Attitude
A person’s perspective toward a specified target and way of saying and doing things.
Brainstorming
An organized approach for producing ideas by letting the mind think without interruption. In group sessions, the participants are encouraged, and often expected, to share their ideas with one another as soon as they are generated.
Closed Curriculum
This is when the elements or content of the curriculum are determined by the education authorities responsible for curriculum development. The development of the curriculum is external to the individual center. Teachers are limited to its specific application with a particular group of students. It adheres to a centralized design. It prescribes in detail the objectives, content, materials, and methods to be used by all teachers in all areas of education.
Cooperative Learning
Proposed in response to traditional curriculum-driven education. In these environments, students interact in purposely structured heterogeneous groups to support the learning of oneself and others in the same group.
Core Curriculum
This is a consequence of understanding the curriculum as something to be determined by the education authorities and schools together. It involves a number of curricular requirements established by the authorities which, before being put into practice, should be adapted to the particular environmental characteristics in which they will be developed by teams of teachers.
Curriculum
What, how, when, the evaluation, and the ‘what for?’ of education.
Education
A social science that encompasses teaching and learning specific knowledge, beliefs, and skills. Licensed and practicing teachers in the field use a variety of methods and materials in order to impart a curriculum.
Emergent Curriculum
This emerges as a result of events, casual lessons, and so on. It is not written but must be controlled by the center.
Explicit Curriculum
Means all aspects of the curriculum that are raised openly (explicitly) by a school community. What we are trying to achieve with the educational act expressed in some way. Not to be confused with the open curriculum.
Hidden or Implied Curriculum
Consisting of all those factors that are present in an educational context (less obvious values, attitudes, strategies, etc.) that directly affect the educational process but are not expressed explicitly. It is not written and comes from the teacher-student relationship.
Individualized Education
A method of instruction in which content, instructional materials, instructional media, and pace of learning are based upon the abilities and interests of each individual learner.
Scaffolding
The provision of sufficient supports to promote learning when concepts and skills are being first introduced to students.
Key Competences
The ability to integrate knowledge, skills, and attitudes in a practical way to solve problems and react appropriately in a variety of contexts and situations. In other words, it is the integration and application of theoretical and practical knowledge in settings outside the academic context.
Knowledge
Defined as expertise and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.
Learning
The process of acquiring knowledge, skills, attitudes, or values, through study, experience, or teaching, that causes a change of behavior that is persistent, measurable, and specified or allows an individual to formulate a new mental construct or revise a prior mental construct (conceptual knowledge such as attitudes or values). It is a process that depends on experience and leads to long-term changes in behavior potential.
Lecture
An oral presentation intended to teach people about a particular subject, for example, by a university or college teacher. Lectures are used to convey critical information, history, background, theories, and equations. A politician’s speech, a minister’s sermon, or even a businessman’s sales presentation may be similar in form to a lecture. Usually, the lecturer will stand at the front of the room and recite information relevant to the lecture’s content.
Lesson Plan
A teacher’s detailed description of the course of instruction for an individual lesson. While there is no one way to construct a correct lesson plan, most lesson plans contain similar elements.
Open Curriculum
It is said that a curriculum is like this when it is not determined, and teachers are responsible for producing it. It is characteristic of a decentralized approach to education, which renounces the purpose of unifying and standardizing the curriculum for the benefit of a better fit and greater respect for the characteristics of each educational context.
Planning
Used for the timing of activities. It is the distribution of a set of activities in a given time frame.
Program
This term is generally used to refer to the ordered set of classroom content. Traditionally, it has been understood as a list of topics or content.
Project
This term is used to refer to educational intentions and how they are implemented. Projects can be defined as the exposure, adaptation, and development of objectives and educational experiences that are intended at one level, stage, cycle, or specific teaching area.
Syllabus
This term refers to the development of an appropriate program for a period of time. It has a number of elements: objectives, content, activities, resources, etc., and the term is often used in reference to the implementation of the curriculum in the classroom. Syllabi include the Didactic Units.
Schedule
Also a timetable, as a basic time-management tool, consists of a list of times at which possible tasks, events, or actions are intended to take place, or of a sequence of events in the chronological order in which such things are intended to take place.
Skills
The learned capacity to carry out predetermined results often with the minimum outlay of time, energy, or both.
Teaching
Traditionally, this has involved lecturing on the part of the teacher. New instructional strategies such as team-based learning put the teacher more into the role of course designer, discussion facilitator, and coach, and the student more into the role of active learner, discovering the subject of the course.