Research School Network: Why is so much time wasted on curriculum development?


Why is so much time wasted on curriculum development?

by Greenshaw Research School
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Most schools seem to be working on developing their curriculum. It seems to be the thing to be focusing on at the moment. In many cases, however, all the time and effort that will go into reviewing schemes of work, looking at curriculum maps or creating knowledge organisers, will probably not have the intended impact.

Why is this?


There are a number of factors that can get in the way of successful curriculum development from a misunderstanding of what it means to develop a curriculum, through to a failure to take into account intrinsic connections to things like staff training and teaching, learning and assessment.

In a recent webinar, we explored some of these complex issues and identified some key areas to consider when developing curriculum. This is no means an exhaustive set of considerations, but it should provide a decent starting point for schools looking to embark on curriculum development.

Reason #1: Ideas about curriculum


The first challenge is to ensure your staff have an appropriate grasp of curriculum theory and the various, sometimes conflicting, arguments within it. Take the idea of a knowledge-rich’ curriculum. Are we talking knowledge in Hirsch’s cultural literacy sense or Young’s powerful knowledge sense and have we considered Freire’s

Teachers need to be familiar with these debates and the ideas which drive them if they are to make informed decisions about the curriculum in your school. And assuming they don’t yet have that understanding, how can you fix this?

Reason #2: Subject knowledge


Your teachers can only teach what they themselves know. If you change your curriculum, you change what must be taught and therefore what your teachers must know. One cannot put metacognition at the heart of the curriculum unless your staff are experts in that approach.

Similarly, the decision to increase the proportion of performing arts in your curriculum will only work if you have enough drama, dance and music teachers to deliver it. Even an adjustment to reflect greater diversity in the English curriculum will require teachers to bone up on texts, authors and contexts of which they previously were ignorant.

What processes and support will you put in place to ensure your teachers know enough to effectively teach?

Reason #3: Disciplinary knowledge


Your staff may have the subject knowledge required to teach your newly designed curriculum but have you delved beneath the surface of subject knowledge’ to consider the components of knowledge that make it up?

Knowledge takes different forms in different subjects as described by Christine Counsell. In some the substantive – the facts and figures, key concepts, great works – are dominant. In others the disciplinary is at least as important – the sense of how that subject is conducted, how it came to be. Curriculum design needs to take account of these differences, to appreciate what is being taught, so that teaching and assessment can be properly aligned.

Reason #4: Pedagogical content knowledge


Still talking knowledge, do your staff have the pedagogical content knowledge to deliver their subject as effectively as possible? Schulman and later Coe et al. highlighted the professional expertise, born largely of experience, that distinguishes the best teachers from the rest. They can pre-empt the common misconceptions, they know what questions to ask, what links to make, what illustrations to use.

Curriculum is not simply the what but the how. As Wiliam put it, curriculum is pedagogy”. And so to optimize your curriculum, you will need this PCK to be distilled and then distributed amongst your teaching teams. How will you do this?

Reason #5: Literacy


Perhaps the greatest challenge to effective curriculum development is the issue of literacy. According to the 2020 GL Assessment report, 25% of students at age 15 still have a reading age of 12 or below. These issues are greater for boys than for girls and the gap increases from Year 7 upwards. A brilliantly designed and delivered curriculum will falter quickly if the students lack the literacy skills to engage with it.

What is the literacy picture in your school? How can you improve it? Is this a problem just for the English Department and if not, how do you engage the wider staff body in this work?

Reason #6: Memory


If literacy is not an issue, memory overload might still be. The world of cognitive science helps us understand how our brains work and therefore how to design and deliver our curriculum for maximum impact.

We must consider how students receive and process knowledge, how they retain it over time and then retrieve it at the other end if we want to help them learn and develop to the best of their ability. Who in your school has this knowledge? If no one, how will you change that?

Reason #7: Assessment


The final challenge is assessment. If this is not testing the things that you value, then the value of those things will diminish. So assessment and curriculum must be very carefully aligned and that is much more difficult than it sounds.

Assessment is also one of the chief ways in which you can evaluate the impact of your intended curriculum and reduce the variation of its implementation in classrooms.

But assessment is also about promoting learning – how can assessment be used to tease out misconceptions, diagnose issues and boost learning through retrieval?

Conclusions:


Perhaps, after all that, it is not surprising that so much curriculum development fails to make its intended impact. The obstacles are many and each of them fraught with their own innate difficulties. They can make successful curriculum development seem impossible. So how do we overcome?

The answer lies in planning. The EEF has highlighted the critical importance of planning in their Putting Evidence to Work: A School’s Guide to Implementation’ which makes the point that it doesn’t matter how great an educational idea or intervention is in principle; what really matters is how it manifests itself in the day-to-day work of people in schools.”

If you would like to explore the challenges of curriculum development and find out how to make sure that the effort in your school is not a waste of time, then sign up to our Evidence Informed Curriculum Development course, starting January 13th, online. 

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