Enacted vs Intended Curriculum

A family of distinctions for tracing the gap between curriculum-as-planned, curriculum-as-taught, and curriculum-as-experienced. The most cited version is John I. Goodlad's five-level scheme in Curriculum Inquiry: The Study of Curriculum Practice (McGraw-Hill, 1979), refined by Larry Cuban's three-level model in How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms, 1880–1990 (Teachers College Press, 1993, second edition).

Goodlad's Five Levels

Goodlad and colleagues distinguished five "substantive" curricula, each representing a different vantage point on the same programme:

• Ideal: what scholars and reformers argue ought to be taught.
• Formal: the officially adopted curriculum sanctioned by a state or board.
• Perceived: the curriculum as understood by teachers, administrators, and parents.
• Operational: what actually happens in classrooms hour by hour.
• Experiential: what learners take away from instruction.

Each layer can diverge from the others. Goodlad's empirical work in A Place Called School (McGraw-Hill, 1984) documented systematic slippage between formal policies and operational classroom practice in U.S. schools.

Cuban's Three-Layer Model

Cuban condensed Goodlad's framework into three layers more usable for teacher-focused analysis:

• Intended (or official) curriculum: documents, standards, and approved syllabi.
• Taught (or enacted) curriculum: what teachers select, emphasise, and present.
• Learned curriculum: what students actually acquire.

Cuban's central empirical claim is that the layers are loosely coupled. Reform efforts that change the intended curriculum often leave the taught curriculum largely intact, especially when teachers' working conditions, assessments, and beliefs do not shift. The intended-taught-learned scheme is now standard in policy and implementation studies.

Relevance to ELT

The framework explains routine phenomena in language programmes:

• Coursebook adoption realities: an institution adopts a communicative or task-based coursebook (intended), teachers retreat to grammar explanation and translation under exam pressure (taught), and learners experience the course as a vocabulary-and-grammar drill (learned).
• CEFR alignment: programmes claim alignment with the CEFR in their formal documents while assessment instruments measure something else, producing a gap between intended and learned outcomes.
• Materials adaptation: see Materials Adaptation. Teacher adaptations are not deviations from the curriculum but a constitutive part of the enacted curriculum, and merit study in their own right.
• Washback: high-stakes test design (see Washback) bends the taught curriculum toward test format regardless of formal goals.

The framework reframes the planner's task: alignment is not a one-off decision but a continuous problem of coupling layers that drift apart under real conditions.

References

• Goodlad, J. I. (1979). Curriculum Inquiry: The Study of Curriculum Practice. McGraw-Hill.
• Goodlad, J. I. (1984). A Place Called School: Prospects for the Future. McGraw-Hill.
• Cuban, L. (1993). How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms, 1880–1990 (2nd ed.). Teachers College Press.
• Porter, A. C., & Smithson, J. L. (2001). Defining, Developing, and Using Curriculum Indicators. Consortium for Policy Research in Education.