Organizing teaching methods according to educational aims: curricular alignment in Higher Education

Resumen

Designing courses for a structured development of competencies and their implementation must be based on the principle of curricular alignment, defined as the coherent relationship among the different elements of the curriculum. According to this concept, two of the elements that must be coherently linked are educational aims and teaching methods. Nonetheless, there is no model nowadays to relate them clearly serving the purposes of teacher training in Higher Education and the design and implementation of academic guides. Focusing on these matters of prime importance concerning teacher competencies, this paper breaks new ground in setting this relationship. Taking a list of educational aims and teaching methods, a relationship between both has been established by a panel of experts followed by the subsequent elaboration of the results by means of descriptive statistics. As a result the most effective teaching methods to develop different educational aims –according to the panel of experts- have been drawn and arranged according to an efficiency and range criteria. The paper thus provides a practical outline for choosing the most appropriate teaching methods to develop different educational aims, an essential aspect regarding competence development in Higher Education.