Sabbatical

I was very lucky to be granted a sabbatical for Term 1, 2010.

In 2008 – 2009 Raglan Area School teachers had been developing our own school curriculum based on the 2007 NZ Curriculum – it was a difficult, challenging process. During this term away from school I was able to research the reasons for this, and write the accompanying report.

Marlene Smith

 

 

 

Curriculum Development – A Test

 

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge and gratefully thank Malcolm Cox, my Principal, and our Board of Trustees for approving this leave; and also the Ministry of Education and Area Schools for the opportunity to take a welcome break and have the time to read and reflect.

 

I’d like to particularly acknowledge the work and leadership of our Heads of Department (HOD’s) and Assistant Principals (AP’s) in the curriculum development process; and the work of all the people at our school who continually strive to lift the learning achievement of our students.

 

Finally I’d like to thank my good friends in the profession and their valuable insights into why our work is both difficult and rewarding.

 

Executive Summary

Schools are required to take the ‘new’ New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) and translate it into a local curriculum for each individual school.  This process is significant and, in our case, required school reform. The curriculum development needs to be driven by the NZC, the changes in pedagogy that are part of the NZC, current education initiatives, and the learning needs of the particular group of students in each school.

Curriculum development is a complex process to lead and manage because the Professional Development (PD) needed by staff is both professionally and personally challenging for many teachers. Teacher practice is challenged within the PD, and new understandings and practices are introduced. In the process of leading this PD it is important that there is a school culture developed while allowing room for individual teacher input and teacher innovation.

The challenging aspects of this Professional Development need to be carefully managed by school leaders, and at MOE policy level, to achieve reform without teachers becoming disengaged.

We need to be able to work through the process without knowing exactly what the final curriculum will look like. As each school works through their curriculum development, each school will achieve a unique and, ideally, authentic result.

Methodology

Formal study – In 2004 I completed my Masters in Educational Administration (Massey University) and in 2008 The National Aspiring Principal’s Program (Waikato University); giving me invaluable theory and practice in Action Research and two different networks of colleagues;

Professional development that focused on curriculum development and leadership; of particular note was PD that was led by Mark Treadwell and, more recently, Lester Flockton. This PD was invaluable in clarifying our school vision and identifying a possible process to significantly change and develop our school curriculum, based on the NZC;

I also received valuable professional support from Gael Donaghy, School Support Services.

 

Theory-in-use

Our school operates as distributed leadership.  In Curriculum Development the leadership is vested in the Curriculum Leader working with a team of Heads of Department (holding subject knowledge and leadership) alongside the Assistant Principals (leaders of teams of teachers teaching specific age groups).  We work to be democratic and collegial in our decision-making and informed by theory and best practice both inside and outside our school.

In my research I focused on theorists who reflect these way of learning and leading, and have been writing about school reform over the last fifteen years.

 

Introduction

Over the last three years we have begun the transition from the previous curriculum to the new curriculum.  Most of the early stages of the curriculum development were done in full staff meetings including Teacher Only Days that were facilitated by outside providers. I led several staff meetings using the DVD ‘The Connected Curriculum’ produced by Lester Flockton in association with the NZEI. In 2009 we moved into the second phase of the development – all teachers, both primary and secondary, worked in a curriculum team under the leadership of the Head of Department for that subject.  Their task was to work together to write a curriculum from Year 0 – Year 13 in that learning area.

Using our school’s model of distributive leadership this process meant that the leadership of curriculum development was the responsibility of two groups - the Heads of Department (subject knowledge and leadership) alongside the Assistant Principals (leaders of the different age groups of our school). We work to be democratic and collegial in our decision making, after being informed by sound knowledge and best practice.

I was the overall leader of this process. The focus of the sabbatical taken during Term 1, 2010, was to consider the implications of our curriculum development process in 2009 and understand why it was raising as many questions as answers for us, as a staff.  I had professionally and personally felt challenged and inexperienced despite accessing as much Professional Development as I could. I used the sabbatical as an opportunity to learn more.

 

Developing our curriculum was a challenging process for three key reasons:

1. The new NZ Curriculum is based around vision, values, and key competencies and how these are lived and portrayed in each individual school.  This allows curriculum to be developed and applied in authentic ways that are appropriate to the local context, but also means that we need to negotiate not only what we will include, but what we will exclude in our own curriculum based on the strengths and needs of our students;
2. An Area School has students aged 5 years – 18+ years.  Our curriculum teams are led by Heads of Department, most of who are secondary trained. In an Area School they need to be familiar with the development of learning in their subject from Year 1 of primary school, as well as understand and ‘embrace’ the pedagogy of subject integration. This is unusual as most HOD’s work within their subject and from Years 9-13 only, in secondary schools;
3. Our school includes a rumaki, Te Roopu Aroha ki te Reo, who are developing their own curriculum based on Te Marautanga.  We also have a Surfing Academy of twenty students from Years 11-13 who, while integrated into the school, have a different curriculum and timetable to the mainstream. It was an additional challenge to include the vision and needs of TRAKTR and the SA within our school reform.

 

At our school our focus and direction is to provide authentic, local, integrated and conceptually based learning through Years 1 – 10; from Year 11 we continue this focus alongside the demands of the NCEA;

 

This focus, and the NZC, has required our teachers to make significant shifts in their teaching pedagogy, and has also required HOD’s to lead curriculum development as a creative, negotiated process.

 

Purpose

This research was conducted in order to clearly identify the barriers, for school leaders, when implementing curriculum requiring a change in pedagogy?

 

Findings and Implications

Ongoing, high quality Professional Development for all school personnel is essential, while also allowing for independent teacher innovation;

“The last decade in education systems around the world has been marked by the extraordinary volume of reform initiatives.  We have seen a wide variety of structural and curricular resources mobilized to support these reforms.  Our work on some of these initiatives has bought us to a conclusion shared by many others in the field: professional development is key to the success of any reform initiative, provided that it is linked to ongoing learning of individuals, and to school improvement, and to related policy and program implementation” (Fullan & Mascall, 2000, p33).

Our teaching staff is a fairly evenly balanced mix of male/female, Maori/Pakeha, younger/older, and primary/secondary trained.  Therefore in any given situation at school we tend to hold a wide range of passionately held views, and we leaders often need to work patiently and at length to achieve a consensus. A degree of consensus is key, or our teachers don’t ‘own’ the change and we can quickly lose momentum. As Flockton (2007, p4) says, “collaborative engagement is one key factor that schools need to consider in the development of curriculum”.

RAS teachers continually adjust their practice to cater for students’ needs and interests.  In any given lesson there can be many such adjustments. They are so much part of teacher practice that they happen unremarked. In recent years we have worked as a staff to capture the essence of these adjustments as we work to effectively educate, in particular, Maori boys. Maori boys are the most significant group in our school’s educational tail of underachievement.

“Many teachers are willing to innovate and individuals and small groups of teachers work daily on problem solving.  The myriad of smaller innovations can be overlooked because the innovating teachers work primarily in isolation and opportunities for them to interact are limited”. Ochoa-Becker, 2007, p212.

 

Pountney (2000, p274) encourages curriculum leaders to focus on what is happening in our school.

“Don’t let curriculum statements suffocate what teachers actually do in your schools. If there is a mismatch, put the children and the highest possible standards of learning for them before what the curriculum statement seems to say – define the curriculum words in terms of your students, not the other way around’.

 

Change (reform) must be managed carefully, both in the school environment and at policy level;

There has been considerable goodwill towards school reform among our Raglan staff but they are also critics of, and impatient with, Professional Development that does not, or does not appear to, fit their needs when they have so many priorities.  I have sometimes felt that we are at saturation point with reform.

 

The previous NZ Curriculum was introduced in stages from 1992. The teacher professional development structure for the introduction consisted of workshops that were facilitated by outside experts – both in school for all staff and off-site (at teacher in-service centres) for delegated members of staff. At that time I was teaching in an urban intermediate school and undertook separate professional development in English, Mathematics, Social Studies and Technology. I recall that my focus was to learn as much as I could in the workshop session and then to trial it in my classroom. My level of engagement was focused at learning all I could from the ‘experts’ and applying that knowledge.

 

That curriculum was then reviewed from 2000-2002. This review highlighted that in the previous decade New Zealanders were subject to an increased pace of social change, ever more sophisticated technologies, and more complex demands in the workplace.  NZ was also becoming a more diverse nation.  Cabinet (the government) agreed that a revised curriculum was needed. A draft for consultation was published in 2006 and more than 10 000 submissions were received, in response, by the Ministry of Education, and were collated and analysed. (NZ Curriculum, P4, 2007). The new NZ Curriculum was then re-written and published.This is two major cycles of Curriculum reform in 15 years. Schools were working to MOE deadline to have the NZC in place for students in the 2010 year. However

“Like any journey, implementation will take time and might take the school in unanticipated directions.  Schools can and do start at different places, and move at different speeds and in different directions as their explorations unfold” ” (Hipkins, Cowie & Boyd, 2009, p45).

 

Additionally, in the last two years the resourcing focus of the MOE moved to the introduction of National Standards (NS), another significant reform for primary teachers.  This timing was unfortunate as it diverted energy away from the implementation of the curriculum towards another process that included learning to work with other teachers to moderate their students’ work, and to change the way we assess and report progress to families. In my opinion, this focus would have happened more authentically as we moved further into the implementation process of the NZC but we were given another separate timeline for the implementation of NS.

 

The professional pressure from the MOE, and public debate and acrimony over National Standards has been unsettling. This is particularly important when considering Fullan’s and Mascall’s comments on successful reform.

“… the overall conclusion from reviewing research on reform is that an integrated ‘pressure and support’ policy set is required.  In return for high standards and greater performance on the part of teachers and schools, significantly greater investments are made in teacher quality and other aspects of the school system. The teaching profession becomes more elevated in the eyes of society (and in its own eyes) as the measurable performance of the education actually improves. Teaching becomes a desirable and highly respected profession” (2000, p9).

Currently there appears to be far more pressure than support.

 

I question the assertion that the teaching profession is a desired and highly respected profession. Staffroom talk reveals how professionally challenging our work is and how isolating and exhausting it can be. As leaders we need to balance the demands of reform with avoiding employee disengagement, as described by Gaisford, NZ Herald, 2010.

“Employee engagement comes in three waves according to a recent Gallup survey of US workers:

• Engaged – those who work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company.
• Not engaged – these employees are essentially “checked out” – sleep walking through their workday, putting time – but not energy or passion – into their work.
• Actively disengaged – employees aren’t just unhappy at work; they’re busy acting out their unhappiness. Every day these workers undermine what their engaged co-workers accomplish.

Gallup’s survey concludes only 29 per cent of US workers are ‘engaged’. A staggering 56 per cent are ‘not engaged’ at all and the remaining 15 per cent are ‘actively disengaged’. Whatever form disengagement takes, the alarming reality is devastating numbers of people no longer bring their hearts to work” (

 

To understand disengagement better I talked to past teaching colleagues from other schools and in other countries, asking them about change and why it is difficult for some in our profession, resulting in their disengagement.

“Reasons teachers don’t want to change? Fear and feeling criticised and vulnerable; they don’t want to lose face ... sometimes its not fear of failure, but sometimes change takes so much energy.. What if it's successful and they can’t keep it up? What if they change and it’s still not right for them? Knowing you have a buddy to confer with so you are changing as a couple or group makes it easier, wipes the competitive aspect ('better than you' syndrome)”. Celeste Ventura

“You will always find many people who don't like change. They don't want to be challenged, don't want to put in any extra effort into thinking, like to leave within a short time of school finishing. Along comes Big Brother (alias Ed Dept, or management) who has brought in changes. These people are always the loudest protesters. They are frightened that their lifestyle is threatened. Their comfort zone will be challenged.
If you are challenging people to change the way they teach or the content – that means a lot of work outside of the classroom. Many people are not willing to put in extra hours. Also they will say they have managed to succeed for this long – why change now?
Why do Govt schools encourage this? - I think a Govt job attracts people to stay (not all of course!) Those that want security, in some ways to be told what to do! Maybe it is a two-way dependency. The Govt needs them to staff the schools, they need the Govt for a job. If the Govt had challenged them right from the beginning it would be different.
Maybe it is more complacency rather then a lack of life long learning. They are happy to stay as they are, to not to be challenged! But if you don’t challenge them then changes can’t be made. Change in education can only be for the better, in that it gets people thinking”. Margot Marks

Because they think what they do is good, they think they cannot teach something they know and understand well in a way they don't know nor understand well (don't master),t hey know it's better but will take them a long time or a lot of effort to learn how to. Clelia Salvati

“They feel safe with what they know and it threatens them that perhaps all they have done before was not as good as it could have been. They don't want to devalue what they've been doing so it's easier to keep doing it”. Tracy Jochmann

“Well I think it’s a number of things. If they don’t have a specific purpose they don’t have to buy in. If there’s no accountability there’s no buy in. I see staff who don’t want to change are like students in my class who drag the chain. They need to know they can make great changes and that they have the ability and support to do so. Sometimes staff doesn’t value the person who is trying to implement change so a small group approach is good. Cover more bases! OK that’s some of my whakaaro - thoughts”. Barbara Fakavamoeanga

Pincus (1974) reflects my colleagues’ view of change: “Three factors favourable to adoption are identified by

1. Bureaucratic safety, as when innovations add resources without requiring behavioural change;
2. Response to external pressure (in which “adoption” may ease the pressure); and
3. Approval of peer elites (in the absence of clearly defined output criteria, whatever is popular among leading professional peers is sometimes the determining criterion” (p.120).

Curriculum development has required behavioural change. However the NS debate has fractured the education community and at this stage there is no approval within peer elites. This has meant that this reform has, primarily, been driven in response to external pressure.

Curriculum design is an organic process and it is not possible to accurately predict the outcome;

Our curriculum design process focussed on developing shared understandings between the HOD’s and I about what ‘form’ our RAS curriculum would take. This was a very difficult negotiation as each subject as it was written ‘looked’ different at the outset of this process.  Even the way the overviews were written was significantly different from subject to subject and from primary to secondary schooling, even without taking into account the significant differences between, for example, Year 1, Year 3 and Year 9 curriculum.

 

I was motivated to negotiate a common design because to integrate learning successfully we need to be able to easily understand each other’s subjects. In fact, breaking down the silos between subjects has proven to be particularly difficult at secondary level.  There is intellectual agreement among secondary teachers that integration would allow more effective, authentic learning but there is also a belief in the sacrosanct boundaries of each subject. This encouraged the HOD’s to approach the curriculum design from a focus on their learning area rather than from a conceptual basis.  In retrospect we would have been better to begin with the vision, key competencies and values – all of which we had explored as a full staff. However this was such a change in pedagogy that we were still finding a way to translate the change in thinking into our daily practice.

 

Two years into the process we are much more comfortable with this paradigm shift and are revising our curriculum with more confidence and understanding.

“The way you change one aspect – integrating key competencies with content, say – will inevitably have an impact on how other parts come into play… it won’t be possible to anticipate a fully figured and tight alignment between all the parts between all the parts: building a complicated new planning structure is likely to be a waste of time and energy, and there has to be an evolutionary element of “try it and learn”. If this all sounds very uncertain and risky it’s because it is! But to assume you can eliminate risk is to assume a complicated frame of reference in which the future can be fully determined by studying the impacts of change on the current parts. We know that’s just not true, especially when the outside environment that surrounds the school system is itself in constant change” (Hipkins, Cowie & Boyd, 2009. p48).

Our teachers now agree that the process of curriculum revision is one that is ongoing, not a set task that can be completed.

Conclusion

McGregor says,

“It is time for schools to resist systemic impulses to make them producers of human capital and claim their role as transformative institutions of human possibility”.

 

During my research I was able to appreciate the larger picture within which school reform, including curriculum development, takes place. Global capitalism has facilitated a reorientation of the focus of educational institutions and has placed education at the forefront of national competitiveness. Education policies are currently primarily designed to serve the needs of the market. However busy working parents are increasingly relying on schools to fulfill part of their family role for them.

“Such neo-liberal economic imperatives have been supported by a variety of neoconservative social forces calling for schools to become sites of cultural and moral restoration” (McGregor, 2009, p345)

 

Fullan comments:

“All the dilemma in Education reform are coming home to roost: top-down versus bottom-up; short-term versus long-term results; centralization versus decentralisation; informed prescription versus informed professional judgment; transactional versus transformative leadership; excellence versus equity. And how does one achieve large-scale reform, anyway; reform that is characterised by serious accountability and ownership?

 

We, as a school, have worked hard to achieve and reflect school reform within our local curriculum; while balancing the conflicting needs and desires of the groups to whom we are accountable.  It has been extremely challenging to do so, especially while keeping up our core daily focus on the achievement of the students in our care.

Having worked our way through the initiation phase we now face another challenge - of sustaining and building on the reform.

As it turns out ‘sustainability’ is at the heart of all these dilemmas.  Is definition is not straightforward.  It is not how to maintain good programs beyond implementation.  It is not how to keep, going in a linear, sustained fashion.  It is not how to keep up relentless energy. For the moment, let’s be satisfied with a general definition:

Sustainability is the capacity of a system to engage in the complexities of continuous improvement consistent with deep values of human purpose.” (Fullan)

The focus of the research I completed while on sabbatical was to address two issues:

Why was the Raglan Area School curriculum development raising as many questions as answers for us, as a staff?

How could I address feeling challenged and inexperienced as the school curriculum leader despite accessing as much Professional Development as possible?

 

Given the importance of the values of human purpose it is little wonder that we have had so many questions, and been so challenged and rewarded by the curriculum development process.

 

 

References

Flockton, L. (2007). From the New Zealand Curriculum to School Curriculum (booklet, item 32631) Ministry of Education Wellington: Learning Media.

Fullan, M. (2005). Education for Sustainability. California: Corwin Press.

Fullan, M. (2007). The New Meaning of Educational Change. New York: Teachers College Press.

Fullan, M. and  Mascall, B. (2000). Human Resource Issues in Education: A Literature Review. Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

Gaisford, C. (2010, April 7). Switch the lights back on. The New Zealand Herald.

Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R., & McKee, A. (2002). Primal Leadership. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Grundy, G. (1994). The Curriculum and Teaching. In E. Hatton (Ed) Understanding Teaching, Curriculum and the Social Context of Schooling. London: Harcourt Brace.

Hargreaves, A., Lieberman A., Fullan, M.,and Hopkins, D. (eds) (1998). International Handbook of Educational Change. Kluwer: Dordrecht.

Hargreaves, D. (2003). Education Epidemic. London:Demos.

Hipkins, R., Cowie, C., and Boyd, S. (2009). The collaborative path to implementation: Insights from the NZCER Curriculum Conference Series. Wellington: NZCER.

Hunter, W. J., and Benson, G. D. (1997). ‘Arrows in Time: The Misapplication of Chaos Theory to Education’, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 29/1, 87-100.

McGregor, G. (2008). ‘Educating for (whose) success? Schooling in an age of neo-liberalism’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 30, No. 3, 345–358.

Ministry of Education. (2007). The New Zealand Curriculum. Wellington: Learning Media.

Ochoa-Becker, A. (2007). Democratic Education for Social Studies. Connecticut: information Age Publishing.

Pountney, C. (2000). Learning our Living. Auckland: Cape Catley Ltd.