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Time to return the focus to the New Zealand Curriculum
The inspiration to write this 'Back to the Future' blog came from my good friend Paul Tegg
In 2007 the revised New Zealand Curriculum was introduced to schools.
It was welcomed as a positive future orientated document and a giant
improvement on the 1995 New Zealand Curriculum. For those of you who remember
this earlier document it was accompanied by eight extensive Learning Area
booklets. The 1995 Curriculum had well thought out principles, values and
essential skills but its down fall was to be found in the associated booklets
with areas divided into levels with a great number of learning objectives to be
assessed for each. It was the confusion and difficulty of assessing student
achievement against these objectives that was the curriculum’s downfall.
The ‘revised’ curriculum features principles, values and key
competencies (very similar to the 95 essential skills). The big difference was
the emphasis on the key competencies. The Learning Areas covered the
‘essence’ of each area and the earlier complicated booklets reduced to an appendix.
The revised document included a valuable section Effective Pedagogy and information for Board of Trustees to
consider.
It was well received.
Unfortunately a change of government introduced literacy and numeracy National Standards for each student to be assessed against. Associated withthese Standards was the future spectre of ‘League Tables’ and the possibility
of performance pay. Other countries that have taken this approach have seen a
narrowing of the curriculum ( this will be inevitable in New Zealand as schools
are judged by the Education Review Office by their success in National
Standards). Having school data published in the newspapers adds more pressure. As a result the focus on the new
curriculum was side-lined.
So it is time, if education rather than politics is to be the winner,
to return the focus back to the 2007 New Zealand Curriculum – a curriculum, if
implemented to the full, requires more than tinkering at the edges. It needs
to become central. At present it has become side-lined; it is, as one English
critic has written, ‘the evil twins of literacy and numeracy have all but
gobbled up the entire curriculum.’
This is not to say schools should ignore National Standards but rather
they need to be put in their place. To misquote G K Chesterton, ‘If a thing is not
worth doing it is worth do it badly so you can get on with what is important.’ Literacy and numeracy are important but
they need to be ‘reframed’ as the ‘foundation skills’ of integrated in- depth
inquiry learning across the curriculum.
I have always liked the visual metaphor for growth of the nautilus
shell that the 2007 Curriculum employs. This is explained on the inside
cover as a mollusc that creates new chambers as it outgrows each existing one
forming a logarithmic spiral that appears elsewhere in nature. American writer Oliver Wendell Holmes saw the nautilus
spiral shell as a symbol of intellectual and spiritual growth and suggested
people need to outgrow their protective shells as they no longer became
necessary; ‘One’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its
original dimensions’; an argument for developmental organic education.
The premise of the 2007 Curriculum is to ‘ensure all young New Zealanders
are equipped with the knowledge, competencies, and values they will need to be
successful to be successful citizens in the twenty-first century’. This is
a vision of students as creative, enterprising lifelong learners all able to
realise their full potential. One phrase that seems integral to achieving
success is that all students should be seen as ‘active seekers, users, and
creators of knowledge’. How to
ensure all students are able to do this ‘seeking and creating’ in all learning
areas is the real challenge for teachers if students are to achieve ‘personal excellence’
and to leave with positive learning identities, students who see themselves ‘as
capable learners’ equipped with a well-developed ‘can-do’ attitude.
The key to develop this positive learning identity are the development
of the key competencies (I prefer the more educational term dispositions).
These competencies are to be seen as both a means and an end and are best
observed through the actions of the students as they involve themselves in
their ‘seeking and creating’. This is a
curriculum that demands personalizing learning – a phrase not mentioned in
the document. This is in direct conflict with the standardisation of the
National Standards with their genesis in a past industrial age.
The Learning Areas (that had a booklet for each in 95) are presented as
distinct, and like the key competencies, are to be seen as ‘both an end and a
means; valuable in themselves and valuable for the pathways … to other
learning’. It is suggested that, ‘All learning should make use of the natural
connections that exist between learning areas….values and key competencies.’
Each Learning Areas provides an important perspective for learning but
the infusing them into contextual studies across the curriculum is a challenge
yet to be realised. An excellent diagram (based on the nautilus) covers the
‘essence’ of each learning area. They all contribute towards ‘meaning making
and creating meaning’. The introduction
to The Arts is important, an area being neglected due to an over emphasis on
Literacy and Numeracy because they are ‘about learning how to use the
imagination to engage with unexpected outcomes’; and they provide for students,
who may have difficulties in Literacy and Numeracy, opportunities for success.
Failing students have an ‘opportunity’ rather than an ‘achievement gap’.
Although all Learning Areas have their own distinctiveness (offering
areas for students’ to discover their unique talents) they all involve generic
problem solving situations. All Learning Areas provide realistic contexts
to ‘think creatively, critically, strategically, and logically’ - to ‘seek, use
and create knowledge’. An inquiry model of learning is expressed
in all Learning Areas – perhaps there is a need make enquiry central to all
learning more explicit? The Science statement says ‘Science is a way of
investigating, understanding and explaining…it involves generating and testing ideas, gathering evidence…and
communicating’. Surely this is the essence of all learning. Some rewriting
might be worthwhile to make this clear?
The Effective Pedagogy section is worth full consideration by all schools. This is what schools need to be
held accountable to provide. If the evidence of effective teaching
presented were to be implemented to the full few students would leave schools
as failures. Schools need to develop
positive relationships with all students and parents; all teaching needs to
values students’ questions and their prior ideas; all inquiries need to
encourage in depth understandings by doing fewer things well; all studies need
to make students aware of connections between Learning Areas and their own
thinking (metacognition); and all students see the relevance of what they are
learning. This is all about personalising learning.
What is missing in the pedagogy section is the need to question the use of ability grouping, setting and streaming – all of which contribute to school
failure. The emphasis National Standards is in conflict with personalised
teaching – the over focus on literacy and numeracy, divorced from the inquiry
programme in primary schools; and streaming and compartmentalised subject
teaching in secondary schools, is unhelpful. Such approaches have their
genesis in a past industrial sorting and grading era and contribute to school failure by discouraging the development of
multi-disciplinary teaching teams at the secondary level, vital to develop
integrated inquiry based personalised learning. A greater emphasis on developing the diverse gifts and talents of all
students would also be valuable.
The concept
of interpreting teaching itself as inquiry is also vital to develop positive
learning environment for all learners. Through such inquiries teachers
evaluate the success of and continually modify their teaching.
The curriculum document offers schools ‘the
scope, flexibility and authority they need to design and shape their curriculum
so that teaching and learning is meaningful to their particular communities.
In turn the design of each school’s curriculum should allow teachers the scope
to make interpretations in response to the particular needs, interests, and
talents of individuals and groups of students in their classes.’
If the spirit of the document, the values,
principles, key competencies and inquiry based programmes integrating the various Learning Areas, were to be implemented schools would be transformed
and this would ensure ‘the realisation of a vision of young people who will be
confident, connected, actively involved lifelong learners’.
This obviously not the case now – and
National Standards are not the answer but literacy and numeracy are still
important. In years 1-6, the curriculum states ‘teaching and learning
programmes are developed through a wide range of experiences across all
learning areas, with a focus on literacy and numeracy along with the
development of values and key competencies.’
Currently it seems like the assessment tail
is wagging the dog! The curriculum offers sensible advice on assessment with
the focus on ‘improving students’ learning and teachers’ teaching’.
‘Assessment’, it states, ‘for the purpose of improving student learning is best
understood as an on-going process that arises out of the interaction between
teaching and learning’. ‘Much of this assessment is “of the moment” …..taking
place in the mind of the teacher, who then uses the insights gained to shape
their actions as they continue to work with their students.’ Surely the best
assessment is to be seen in the actions and behaviours of the students and by
what they can perform, exhibit, demonstrate, or show in their portfolios.
The curriculum is underwritten ‘with the
premise that all students can learn and succeed and should recognise that, as
all students are individuals, their learning may call for different
approaches….and different goals’.
The 2007 New Zealand Curriculum has yet to
be fully implemented – at best schools are tinkering around the edges – at
worst totally distracted by the reactionary demands of National Standards.Jane Gilbert, in her book ‘Catching the Knowledge Wave’ NZCER reprinted 2008,
writes, ‘we can’t do more of what we are currently doing… we cannot add new
ideas to an old framework’. And adds we need to ‘develop a new public
understanding about what we think and hope our education can do for people’.
It is time now to put the challenges of the
curriculum at centre stage.
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