How to advise change in a curriculum as a new teacher Due to the Corona crisis I was forced in to a temporary career switch. Currently I am working as a sort of &quot;supervisor&quot; for students in a controlled environment where they do projects provide from companies. So they get some practical work experience while not directly working at a company (Seeing most companies don't accept interns due to the corona crisis).
My issue however is that the students (in my opinion) are nowhere near the level they are supposed to be. They are in their second year of college(software engineering), yet barely have complete understanding of the basics. This is partially due to classes falling out due to the Corona crisis, but also in my eyes because their program is slow paced and wrongly focused (Nearly the entire year is dedicated towards HTML/CSS, they barely touched PHP/JavaScript/Databases and had nothing in terms of documentation).
This forces me to spend more time doing lectures and teaching them what they were supposed to learn then actually doing my so called &quot;supervisor&quot; duties of managing the projects. To help them increase their level of knowledge I started making my own little assignments for them to practice with and referring online tutorials to them but, I can not force them to do them so a large chunk just ignores it.
Seeing I am doing a good-job I will also be doing extra groups as of February and will be giving actual lectures besides my supervisor role.
This is my first &quot;teaching&quot; job and I am wondering how I can advise the school to make changes in their curriculum without sounding like a know it all/arrogant. Seeing the students have shown to me that with the right structure they are more then able to grasp the material but the schools pace and prioritization of the materials is to slow/focused on the wrong things. As a result the students literally telling me that they don't see the &quot;urgency&quot; of doing their work seeing the got way to much time to do it and it's boring due to the ease of it.
You might not like this answer, but I would be cautious. There could be many reasons why their curriculum is laid out in the way that is.
They might be dealing with students of more varied abilities at the start than you think. They might have later coursework that depends upon mastery of the current coursework. They might only have it in place for historical reasons.  This current curriculum may well be in place because of certain problems with another approach that they took in the past.  Or, they may feel that the mission of their program is somewhat different than you think it is.  (This last is almost a given, actually.)
Therefore, the first order of business is, at least for a while, to do more listening than speaking.
Now, as for what you can do: at least in the US, many institutions that teach to the ages you mention have periodic curriculum reviews. Sometimes these committees can even involve outside representatives from industry.  You could express your interest in serving on such a committee if your institution engages in this practice.
Beyond that, you can certainly share your observations.  Most people (though certainly not all) would be willing to engage in such a discussion with someone who is not pushy or overly-opinionated.  And, in such a conversation, you may well find that there is openness to change!  What I would stress, however, is that you should also remain open to the idea that things are in place for reasons that you simply don't know, and they might not ultimately choose to change the structure.