Benefits of Process-Oriented Curriculum for Elementary Schools
A process-oriented curriculum can help students self-regulate, become excellent communicators, develop emotional intelligence, and embrace lifelong learning.
If you’re looking for an education space or curriculum compatible with your child’s learning style, you’ll discover several different modalities—one of which is process-oriented teaching.
A process-oriented curriculum can help students self-regulate, become excellent communicators, develop emotional intelligence, and embrace lifelong learning.
But what is a process-oriented curriculum? What does a process-oriented classroom look and feel like? Let’s get into the specifics of this modality and its benefits for elementary students.
What Is A Process-Oriented Curriculum?
The most important pillar of process-oriented teaching is self-directed learning—teachers foster self-directed learning by:
- Establishing and modeling a critical thinking process
- Teaching students how to find and create their own solutions to problems and questions
- Giving students opportunities to flex their self-direction and -regulation skills in the classroom
A process-oriented curriculum encourages students to find their own answers to their questions by:
- Exploring and sharing ideas with teachers and other students via group discussion
- Describing how they reached their conclusions
- Reviewing what they already know and drawing conclusions from existing knowledge
- Making critical decisions about their own learning process (e.g., deciding which source or method to use to find new information that answers their questions)
4 Benefits of a Process-Oriented Learning Environment
The modality described above can provide significant benefits to young learners—even elementary school students. Some of the advantages that a process-oriented curriculum provides at the primary level are listed below.
#1 It Encourages Self-Direction and Student-Led Regulation
Process-oriented learning is, at its core, self-directed. When confronted with a problem or question, a process-oriented approach asks students to:
- Consider their current knowledge
- Ask others about their knowledge
- Determine where to find answers to their questions
- Interpret information from sources to discover solutions
- Share their findings and how they reached their conclusions with their classmates
All of the steps above are intended to be student-led. In an elementary setting, teachers model and prompt students to complete this process, offering additional autonomy as students “learn how to learn.”
#2 It Facilitates Communication Skills
Communication is a critical part of the process-oriented modality—students are challenged to learn by:
- Consulting their existing knowledge and sharing that information with other thinkers
- Working in a group to solve a problem or find answers
- Sharing how they reached their conclusions, not just the information they discovered
Process-oriented curricula’s emphasis on group work, information sharing, and inquiry help students develop the communication skills they need to ask valuable questions, participate in active discussions, and share their existing knowledge.
#3 Emotional Intelligence is a Major Consideration
Emotional intelligence describes the ability to:
- Connect emotionally to ourselves, others, and events
- Recognize and understand others’ emotional responses
- Share meaningful, authentic experiences with others
- Develop and exercise empathy
Students in a process-oriented environment develop emotional intelligence in two crucial ways:
- They recognize others’ passions and emotional responses when working in groups
- They set goals that increase their emotional investment in the learning process
The built-in collaborative aspects of the process-oriented approach give students an opportunity to learn new information and explore how that information (and finding it) makes them (and others) feel.
#4 It Encourages Lifelong Learning
In a primary education setting, teachers model process-oriented behaviors in an effort to teach students how to learn—and once they find autonomy, empowerment, and emotional investment in the discovery process, it’s difficult to stop their momentum.
Students taught to think critically, work with others, and ask questions have a strong foundation for continued investigation in education settings and beyond. Why?
Because discovering answers to your own queries using your own skills is a powerful experience—one that students want to repeat.
What Does a Process-Oriented Classroom Look Like?
Process-oriented curricula can be powerful. But what does this teaching style look like in classrooms in real time?
Teachers trained in process-oriented instruction start by modeling the learning process for their students:
- They pose a question to students
- They ask for input or feedback about the question (accessing prior knowledge)
- They discuss where to find new information
- They describe how to synthesize prior knowledge and new information into a solution
- They explain how they reached their conclusions
Modeling is critical in elementary education, and teachers will return to these tactics even after students begin to develop self-directed learning skills.
And, once students take a larger role in the learning process, teachers encourage them to:
- Share their answers to questions in complete sentences
- Compare and contrast their answers with group members
- Think of related follow-up questions (both individually and as a group)
All Saints’ Episcopal Day School: Shaping Lifelong Learners
A process-oriented curriculum can provide an opportunity for your student to develop self-regulation, learn to communicate, develop emotional intelligence, and become a lifelong learner.
At All Saints’ Episcopal Day School, we encourage teachers and students to explore process-oriented curricula and develop critical thinking skills, empathy, and independence. If you’re ready for your student to adopt a love of learning, reach out to us to learn more about the All Saints’ Way.