Professional Education · Curriculum and Instruction
Curriculum Development — Part 1 of 3
The Working Definition and the Four Phases
Curriculum Development: The Working Definition
Curriculum development is the continuous, cyclical process by which educators and curriculum specialists plan, design, implement, evaluate, and refine the curriculum to meet the changing needs of learners and society. It is not a single event but an ongoing cycle — a curriculum is never “finished,” only ever current.
The process is typically broken into four interdependent phases, a sequence you should be able to recall in order:
- Curriculum Planning — identifying goals, needs, and the philosophical/legal basis for the curriculum.
- Curriculum Design — organizing content, learning experiences, and assessment into a coherent structure.
- Curriculum Implementation — translating the written curriculum into actual classroom practice.
- Curriculum Evaluation — determining whether the curriculum achieved its intended outcomes, feeding back into planning.
Exam Tip: The cycle returns to Planning after Evaluation — curriculum development never terminates. If a question describes a school using evaluation results to revise next year’s plans, that is the cycle in motion, going from evaluation back into planning.
If you remember just one sentence from this section, remember this: curriculum development is a continuous cycle, not a one-time project. That single idea will help you answer a surprising number of exam questions, since many wrong-answer choices try to suggest curriculum work ends at some point.
Sample LET Item — No. 1
A new school principal tells the faculty, “Our curriculum was finalized last year, so there is no need to revisit it again.” Which statement best evaluates this view?
A. The principal is correct; a finalized curriculum should remain unchanged to preserve consistency.
B. The principal is mistaken; curriculum development is a continuous cycle that returns to planning after evaluation.
C. The principal is correct, provided the curriculum passed its initial implementation phase.
D. The principal is mistaken, but only because finalized curricula must be revised every ten years by law.
Answer: B
The principal’s statement treats curriculum development as a one-time event with a fixed endpoint, which directly contradicts the core definition: curriculum development is continuous and cyclical, with evaluation feeding back into planning rather than closing the process. Choice A and C both repeat the same flawed assumption that the curriculum can be permanently finished. Choice D introduces a fabricated ten-year rule not found in the actual definition — a common distractor pattern where a partially correct conclusion is paired with an invented justification. Always check whether the reasoning behind a choice is accurate, not just whether the final verdict sounds right.
Applying the Four Phases
The LET rarely asks you to simply list the four phases. More often, it embeds a phase inside a short classroom or school-level scenario and asks you to identify which phase is being described. Consider how each phase looks in practice:
| Phase | What It Looks Like in a School |
| Planning | A school conducts a needs assessment survey among parents and teachers before deciding what a new reading program should prioritize. |
| Design | A curriculum committee arranges the reading program’s content into weekly units and decides which quizzes will measure progress. |
| Implementation | Teachers begin actually using the new reading materials and weekly units inside their classrooms. |
| Evaluation | At the end of the school year, the committee reviews test scores and teacher feedback to decide what to adjust. |
Sample LET Item — No. 2
Before introducing a new mathematics program, Teacher Reyes’ school surveyed parents and students to determine which topics learners struggled with most. Which phase of curriculum development is illustrated?
A. Curriculum Design
B. Curriculum Implementation
C. Curriculum Planning
D. Curriculum Evaluation
Answer: C
Surveying parents and students to identify learning needs happens before any content is organized or taught — this is the identification of goals and needs that defines Planning. A common trap here is choice A, Design, because the scenario involves a curriculum decision; but design only begins once the content and structure are being organized, which has not happened yet in this stem. The verb to watch for is “determine,” not “organize” or “arrange” — that distinction usually separates Planning from Design in scenario items.
Coming Up in Part 2
Next, we distinguish curriculum improvement from curriculum change, and walk through the seven types of curriculum the LET tests through classroom scenarios.