Tyler's Rationale
The four-question framework for curriculum planning set out by Ralph W. Tyler in Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction (University of Chicago Press, 1949). It established objectives-driven curriculum design as the dominant twentieth-century paradigm and remains the conceptual antecedent of Backward Design and competency-based planning.
The Four Questions
Tyler proposed that any curriculum or plan of instruction must answer:
- What educational purposes should the school seek to attain?
- What educational experiences can be provided that are likely to attain these purposes?
- How can these educational experiences be effectively organised?
- How can we determine whether these purposes are being attained?
The questions correspond to objectives, learning experiences, organisation, and evaluation. Tyler treated them as logically ordered but iterative: evaluation feeds back into objectives, and objectives are refined by what learners and society demand.
Sources of Objectives
Tyler argued that objectives should be drawn from three sources, then filtered through two screens. The sources are studies of learners themselves, studies of contemporary life outside school, and suggestions from subject specialists. The screens are educational philosophy and the psychology of learning. This filtering protected planners from accepting every demand uncritically and gave the model an explicit normative dimension that later objectives-based traditions sometimes dropped.
Influence on ELT
Tyler's logic underwrites most modern language curriculum planning that begins with statements of what learners should be able to do. The architecture of the CEFR, Can-Do Statements, and Competency-based Teaching traces directly to it. Forward Design inverts Tyler's order by starting from content rather than ends, while Backward Design preserves the objectives-first sequence and tightens the alignment between outcomes, assessment, and learning experiences. SMART Objectives operationalise the rationale at lesson level.
Critiques
The most influential critique is that Tyler's model treats education as a means-ends technology and underplays the moral, political, and emergent dimensions of teaching. Lawrence Stenhouse's An Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development (1975) attacked the objectives model for reducing knowledge to behaviourally specifiable products and proposed a process model in response (see Process and Product Curriculum). Hilda Taba accepted the rationale but argued for an inductive, teacher-led sequencing of its steps (see Taba's Model). Critical pedagogues including Apple and Giroux questioned whose purposes the model serves and what it renders invisible (see Hidden Curriculum and Null Curriculum). Within ELT, Stern, Richards, and Nation have all noted that strict objectives planning struggles with the emergent, exploratory aspects of language use.
References
- Tyler, R. W. (1949). Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction. University of Chicago Press.
- Stenhouse, L. (1975). An Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development. Heinemann.
- Hlebowitsh, P. S. (2013). Foreword to the new edition of Tyler's Basic Principles. University of Chicago Press.
- Kliebard, H. M. (1970). Reappraisal: The Tyler rationale. School Review, 78(2), 259–272.