Covert Curriculum Reflection

EDU – 606 | Reflection: Environments - Covert Curriculum | 1

Reflection: Creating Learning Environments

The Covert Curriculum Defined

The covert curriculum directs what students implicitly learn from the school’s culture – the institution’s implied values as communicated by rules, rituals and routines.

The covert curriculum is the unwritten, informal code of conduct to which students are expected to conform. It is the school's culture that includes shared norms, values, beliefs, traditions, rituals, and customs. The first person to use the phrase was Philip W. Jackson in his 1968 work, Life in Classrooms. Jackson argues that in order to study any subject in the formal curriculum, a student must first learn deference. Deference, says Jackson, is a form of "hidden learning." For instance, a student has to learn to defer to the authority of the teacher, the selection of what is presented as valid knowledge, the system of learning and to the teacher's assessment of progress. So there is a curriculum of content -- the overt curriculum, and a curriculum of process -- the covert curriculum. The covert, unstudied curriculum of the educational system is what Jackson says "reproduces the basic structure of the culture."

The Covert Curriculum includes the following:

. sequential room arrangements;

. the timed segments of formal instruction;

. an annual schedule that is still arranged to accommodate an agrarian age;

. disciplined messages where concentration equates to student behaviors were they are sitting up straight and are continually quiet;

. students getting in and standing in line silently;

. students quietly raising their hands to be called on;

. the endless competition for grades,

. what subject matter is neglected by the formal curriculum

. the rhetoric and ideas communicated by teachers and school officials