I am so pleased to be able to bring some wonderful educators to Nelson on the 22nd and 23rd of September for our cluster’s curriculum seminars.  This is going to be an exciting time for us all.  While we are all doing a variety of things in terms of implementing the curriculum in our own schools, it is fair to say that we are not quite ready to implement our own school’s curriculum… actually, it is not even in its design stage yet, but that is cool – because we are getting ourselves into a position to do this, and do it well!  :-)

Over this next month there will be an incredible amount of development and professional learning around curriculum and curriculum designs for schools in our region.  This is going to help our team and provide us with some much needed ‘digestion’ and ‘reflection’ time to enable us to review our plans and assert what it is we are going to do.  What’s more is that it is collaborative and will lead to some projects and developments across schools too!

This leads me to the reason for this entry… What would you ask schools and school leaders who are well down the track of implementation of the NZC and development of their own curriculum?  Please add these questions as comments below.  I would love your feedback!

Many thanks.

Moving into this new New Zealand curriculum paradigm (you know, the one that needs to be implemented by 2010!) we are going to need strong and effective pedagogical leadership.  This will take courage from school leaders to develop plans for what amounts to significant change in teachers’ beliefs, values and of course, practice.  Successful curriculum implementation, including all of those wonderful curriculum frameworks being developed by schools around the country, will not occur without these shifts in teachers values, beliefs and practice.  Also none of this will happen unless it (the change) is planned for and actioned with a great deal of critical reflection (in my humble view).

So what do we do to get ourselves ready for New Zealand Curriculum implementation?  I have chosen 4 key ideas to explore briefly in this post…

1. Involving teachers as ‘experts’.

School leaders need to involve teacher leaders as ‘experts’ and principals should acknowledge this expertise and build on it through strategic decision making and providing opportunity for staff to be involved, not only in the delivery of PD, but in the planning for change in teacher values, beliefs and practice.

2. Communication of the goals and plans

These plans and associated goals need to be clearly communicated with staff and communities.  Time frames should be set and specific indicators should inform evaluation and reflection on progress and reviews of plans.

3. Make it a ‘lifestyle’ change

What we are talking about here is a major cultural change in schools, not simply another ‘thing to do’.  Much like the dieting analogy (you’ve probably heard this one)… this is not a change to your diet… it is a change to your lifestyle!  You need to change more than your curriculum for there to be successful integration.  This needs alignment to school vision, policy, strategy, pedagogy, values and beliefs, plus many other big and minor players.

4. Involvement of the principal

The school principal needs to lead by example here.  Be passionate about the changes, model effective practice and take pride in the achievements (and failures), and never take your eyes of the prize… improved learning outcomes for students.  Principals need to participate in all of the professional development and communicate with, and involve stakeholders (teachers included) in how things are going.  Plus being the coach to support everyone through the process at the individual and collective levels.  The principal is the driver of the change, this shouldn’t be confused for being the ‘imposer’ of the change.

The school is a ‘place of learning’ and as such all learners (adults too) need to feel empowered and be ‘enabled’ to engage with the curriculum and for the curriculum developments.  As I stated earlier, this development must be based firmly on quality teacher values, beliefs and practice and where possible helping teachers change their own paradigms (as Stephen Covey states – in order to change someone’s behaviour, you need to look first to change their paradigm).

I will add more about this later… it seems to be evolving the more I think about it.

What is powerful:  Collaboration around the design of the curriculum?  Or collaboration around the implementation of curriculum?

I am not trying to dichotomise this concept, but rather look at the individuality of Schools and consider what is the most powerful way for us to collaborate around curriculum.

Let us consider collaboration around curriculum design.  Every School is an individual and unique place, based on its own values and beliefs as well as its own paradigms.  We all look at this through a different lens.  Curriculum design therefore needs to reflect this, while the framework may be shared, the individual school’s curriculum should reflect its values and beliefs and those of its community.  This said, when is the right time to design a curriculum framework?  Given that age old saying (and possibly another one of those ICT-PD Cluster cliches) ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’, unless we have the grounding in pedagogy, purpose, understanding of our learners and their paradigms (which can be argued as part of curriculum design anyway)… then the change brought on by this ‘fast-tracked’ approach and development will not be as significant as we hope – or it will be the ‘first order’ change, which is fine… but not really the change we hope to implement.  So would it be best to start looking at curriculum design once we (our teachers and communities inclusive) have a better understanding of 21st century learning and can have wider and greater involvement and sharing of this process?  This gives rise to another concern chipping away in the back of my mind… if a select group designs and asks for this to be implemented, what are the chances that we are going to see quality changes at the classroom level?  Are we in danger of having a 21st century framework that will be implemented the 20th century way?  Collaboration around curriculum design must therefore be inclusive as well as based on sound understandings of pedagogy, purpose, and understanding of our learners and their paradigms. Learning and curriculum is too complex and dynamic to fit into a nice neat box in a ‘cut and paste’ fashion.

The second part of the question is also highly relevant.  For 21st century curriculum, it is fine for different schools to have different curriculum design (in fact as I argue above, this should be encouraged), but the power in curriculum collaboration is in the shared implementation and exploration of learning with the curriculum.  This can look so different and be so powerful, especially with the tools available to us now with ICT.  The point here is that, while framework and design can look different to every school, implementation and exploration can be collaborative, dynamic and synergistic (creative collaboration) meaning that we are working together on the stuff that matters… learning.