Less Is More: A New Concept Of Teaching Content Design

In the field of education, although there have been Singapore's education reform of "Teach Less, Learn More" and Finland's educational phenomenon of "less is more",the overall discussion about the application of "less is more" in teaching is still lack. As the concept “less is more" itself has important value, I believe that filling up the lack of this part of study is necessary.Therefore, this paper focuses on the teaching content design and systematically studies the application and implementation of the concept "less is more" in teaching content design.Firstly, this paper defines the concepts "teaching content","teaching content design" and"less is more" based on the analysis and synthesis of the previous researches. Then, the paper explains the connotation of "less is more" in teaching content design from the aspects of "better less","core less" and "open less",emphasizing that teachers should simply teaching content and conduct classroom instruction in a way promoting students' thinking development. Lastly, the paper summarizes the content in the first chapter with the opinion that "'less' is 'more'", that is"less" can produce "much more" value than we thought, and points out that the realization of the connotation “less is more" must be based on the "less" quantity of teaching content.Based on the analysis above, this paper discusses the value and necessity of the application of"less is more" in teaching content design combining specific cases. In the perspective of practice,through classroom observation and interviews on students and teachers, I found that due to the lack of the concept "less is more",there were many issues in teachers' teaching content design,such as lack of simplification, lack of depth and lack of integrity and openness, leading the repression of students' enthusiasm and creativity, greatly affected the effect of classroom teaching.From the view of theory,this paper holds that the concept "less is more" can improve the effiency of the classroom instruction and improve the teaching effect. It not only plays a positive role in the development of students, creative thinking ability, high-level thinking ability and key competence,but also can arouse teachers' curriculum consciousness to a large extent and promote the professional development of teachers.Finally, this paper also discusses how to achieve "less is more" in teaching content design. At the macroscopic level, school and the whole education system need to give teachers more freedom and autonomy and properly adjust the current educational evaluation mechanism to provide conditions for the application of "less is more" in teaching content design, so that teachers would have time, willingness, and have the right to carry out high-quality teaching content design. In microcosmic perspective, teachers should streamline teaching objectives and abandon fragmented knowledge points to achieve the simplification of teaching content design. Also, teachers need to do reflecting understanding, find the core of knowledge points and grasp the curriculum thinking mode, in order to achieve the depth and delicacy of the teaching content design. Besides, teachers should provide students with a safe classroom learning environment and give students the opportunity to do self-study to ensure the openness of the teaching content presentation.