Reflecting on teachers’ experiences of curriculum-making

By Rosemary Hipkins

On Tuesday 24 March, I was asked to give a short talk to begin a day of discussions about how to respond to the current versions of Aotearoa New Zealand’s national curriculum documents. Thirty-four different educational organisations were represented in the room. I was aware that each person’s own experiences of curriculum-making would be a unique mix of both positives and challenges. I decided it might be helpful to review my own experiences at different stages of my career, as an entry point to reflecting on how the new documents might land with teachers at different places in their own understanding of curriculum-making.

I sub-titled my talk “a dialectic of losses and gains” because, over the years, I have become acutely aware of how difficult it can be to build a curriculum that meets everyone’s needs and expectations. Addressing one set of challenges can inadvertently create new issues or bring previous challenges back into view. I invited everyone in the room to reflect on five areas where I saw the potential for both losses and gains when any new version of a national curriculum is being made:

• How clear are signals about what to teach?

• How are vision and purpose(s) for learning conveyed?

• Do the curriculum pieces combine meaningfully?

• How is progression signalled?

• How are learner-centred challenges accommodated?

Other people will no doubt have different questions to mine. I was a secondary teacher. Some of the curriculum-making experiences of primary teachers, or of early childhood teachers, will be the same and others will be different. I was also very aware that I didn’t have direct personal experiences of what it might mean to create a more genuinely bi-cultural curriculum—one that pays more than lip service to the commitments made when Te Tirit o Waitangi was signed—until near the end of my career. As I listened to the group who spoke with such passion about Te Marautanga o Aotearoa, directly after my own talk, I felt both sad for the missed opportunities and inspired by the possibilities.

What follows is an abbreviated version of my reflections on the five areas of challenge on which I focused. I’ve re-ordered them to make the written narrative a bit simpler to follow. For me personally, questions of vision and purpose should always come first.

How clear are signals about what to teach?

My first year of classroom teaching was 1972. If there was a national curriculum, I didn’t know about it. I got my initial guidance from the textbooks already in the school, and from the exam prescriptions for School Certificate and Bursary. Over the early years of my career these resources helped me build a strong body of content knowledge that stood me in good stead as the 1990s curriculum changes began to roll through the system. This was the decade in which outcomes-based curriculum documents were produced for seven learning areas (which later became eight when Learning languages was separated from English). Science was the third learning area to be developed. The new achievement objectives aligned with my existing teaching experiences, so I responded by repackaging my learning plans along the lines now required. Notably, I didn’t think to ask any critical questions about the how and why of the changes. Then, towards the end of decade I was invited to be on the writing panel for the new learning area that combined the previously discrete subjects of Health, Home Economics and Physical Education. By now I was working in teacher education and undertaking post-graduate study. I was in a stronger position to take part in challenging debates as we endeavoured to find common ground across these very different subjects. This was my first direct experience of national-level curriculum-making, and the considerable effort needed to reach consensus across groups with different teaching contexts and commitments.

As I reflect on that young teacher and how unaware she was, I can see how the current moment is responding to those teachers who might be struggling with knowing what to teach. The achievement objectives of the 1990s documents were quite high-level. This wasn’t an issue if you already knew what to teach, but the lack of explicit content guidance was problematic for early-career teachers. The 2007 curriculum exacerbated this problem. I was on the science writing panel. Our brief was to reduce the overall number of achievement objectives (AOs), without in the process fundamentally changing the organisation and foci of the 1993 document. Inevitably, the achievement objectives became even more high-level as different concepts were stitched together in one new AO. So, there is a potential gain in the new documents for teachers who need more explicit support. But I do suspect we have over-corrected. A content-heavy set of prescribed content might support some teachers (though even they are likely to find it hard to juggle time demands), but at what cost? This is where my next and most important question (for me) kicks in.

How are a vision and purpose(s) for learning conveyed?

If you had asked young-teacher-me about what students should get out of their science learning, I would probably have given you some version of what I now think of as ‘knowing all the stuff’. Early in my career a minor tweak to the Bursary Biology prescription prompted me to reflect on my role in helping my students look at the natural world around them with more ‘educated eyes’. I wanted them to recognise and name diverse species, and just generally appreciate how special our flora and fauna are. But that’s probably as far as I got with any explicit thinking about what learning might be for. It reflected my own interests rather than something signalled in a curriculum document. That changed in the late 1990s, partly because of my experiences on the Health and PE writing panel, but mainly because biology teachers were one of the groups chosen to trial achievement-based assessment (ABA). That early foray into standards-based assessment reform set me on a whole new learning trajectory. I now saw that there were outcomes in addition to demonstrations of declarative knowledge that could be meaningfully and systematically assessed.

The nature of debates about what a specific curriculum might signal about purposes for learning changed and deepened across the course of the 1990s. English, maths and science, developed early in the decade, were still comparatively traditional in this regard. Then, in 1993, and separately from these curricula, a framework to sit over the whole curriculum was produced. That slim volume introduced new ideas about curriculum elements such as values and skills, which could be developed alongside the more familiar content. This framework, in conjunction with debates about how to shape coherent learning areas from diverse subjects, prompted some visionary thinking about the types of learning outcomes that would have value for young people in Aotearoa New Zealand today. The learning areas developed last in that decade benefitted from this new curriculum design thinking and those differences were carried forward into the curriculum revisions of the early 2000s. As I have already noted, the brief for those revisions was mainly to reduce the number of achievement objectives. In this streamlining process the overarching Achievement Aims (AAs) got rather lost—they didn’t fit on the fold-out pages of the 2007 document, although they could still be accessed online, at least for those learning areas that still created them. If teachers knew to read AOs back against the AAs, they could arguably shape broader purposes for learning, but even this avenue for innovative curriculum design thinking now closed

Meantime the ‘front end’ of the 2007 curriculum evolved and expanded from the fledging stand-alone framework published in 1993. New elements such as the key competencies, which arrived via policy-borrowing from the OECD, pointed to the potential to develop a wider range of learning outcomes, but only if the back and front parts of the curriculum could be meaningfully woven together. I’ll get to that in a minute. One of the very last new elements to be developed was short snappy statements about what each learning area might contribute to an overall education. I have been told they were almost an after-thought (but have never seen this written down anywhere). It would explain why they are so uneven in their messaging. Compare these two:

The English statement outlined what learners should do, but not necessarily why doing these things might be of value to them. No doubt many teachers simply filled this gap with their own personal vision, like I did for senior biology back in the early years of my career. By contrast, notice the semantic ‘so that’ on which the science statement turns. The social studies one is very similar. I don’t know how much notice teachers took of this feature of the 2007 curriculum as they designed classroom learning experiences —I pointed it out whenever I could!

The 2020s curriculum refresh initially presented an opportunity to revisit these developments, but this does now seem to have been an opportunity lost. It seems to me as if, by default, we are right back to ‘knowing all the stuff’ as the main purpose for learning. I feel that as a loss but recognise that some teachers will not be troubled by this reversion to traditional expectations.

Do the curriculum pieces combine meaningfully?

There was a real challenge to address here. It was acute with the 2007 curriculum, where there was such a disconnect between the visionary new front half and the revised learning area statements in the back half. But that challenge was not new—it was already present in the 1990s. Back then, the overarching framework was a separate document, and I have already noted that it was largely applied retrospectively to the English, maths and science learning areas: the science curriculum belatedly added a list of skills to be developed, right at the back of the document.

Meaningful weaving of curriculum elements could also be a challenge within a learning area. For example, the 1993 science curriculum included a strand called “Making sense of the nature of science and its relationship to technology” (the NOS strand). In preparation for the curriculum revision at the start of the century, Waikato University conducted systematic reviews of teachers’ understanding of all the 1990s curricula. The science survey revealed a widespread misunderstanding about what the NOS strand was for. Many teachers believed it had become redundant when the technology learning area was developed. Others simply saw it as more stuff to learn. This was also my understanding until I undertook post-graduate study. That opened my eyes to the role that a non-traditional thread within a curriculum might play in reshaping purposes for learning. The science writing team tried to model this more explicitly when the 2007 curriculum was developed. In that document the NOS strand was positioned as cross-cutting, but it could still be a stretch to connect its intent to the purpose statement outlined above. Some of my science education colleagues and I tried to address this challenge when the ‘science capabilities’ resources were developed but this work was arguably too little, too late.

The 1990s meaning-making dilemma was essentially the same as the dilemma facing the 2007 key competencies. Research from a range of projects suggested that, if teachers took notice of key competencies at all, they typically saw them as things to learn about, rather than as signals that the way “content’ was introduced might need to change to support wider purposes for learning. Some teachers understood this and did amazing curriculum design work. Many more did not. There were two potential gains here when the 2020s curriculum refresh began. A new understand/know/do structure for the learning areas had the potential to model rich ways to weave disparate curriculum elements together. Sadly, the work of the initial writing teams was stopped before this potential could be realised, or supported with new learning materials that modelled how to weave traditional content with other curriculum elements. Although I had some reservations about the clarity of differences between ‘understand’ and ‘know’, I feel the recent disappearance of this feature as a loss.

In a similar way, the first version of Te Mātaiaho updated and more explicitly brought together the diverse elements from the front end of the 2007 curriculum, within a framework that explicitly honoured Te Tirit o Waitangi. The recent unilateral alteration of this framework is a huge loss, as well as disrespecting the deep contribution of Māori scholars to its naming and development. In the process of making these most recent changes the voices of young people, as captured by their vision statement, also got lost. And with that thought, I turn now to two questions about curriculum-making that takes account of the diversity of learners, and how well their needs are accommodated within the national curriculum itself.

How is progression signalled?

Young teacher me would probably have answered this question with some variant of “you teach more basic stuff to younger kids, and harder stuff to older ones”. With no experience of primary school education, differences in developmental stages were just not on my radar. I suspect this is still the case for teachers who have not had the opportunity to take part in reflective conversations about young people’s developmental trajectories and what those differences might imply for curriculum-making. The 1990s curricula arguably exacerbated this blind spot when, for the first time, they ‘seamlessly’ signalled a unified learning trajectory from year 1 all the way through to year 13. One consequence was that secondary-oriented thinking about purposes for learning began to trickle down into the primary schools.

The 1990s documents did at least deliberately break a pattern of year-by-year batching of all students in an age group. I have been told that the choice of eight levels was made for this purpose—it could not be neatly mapped to years of schooling. Both the 1990s documents and the 2007 curriculum added to the signals that not all students at any one age are ready for the same learning at the same time by blurring the edges their respective diagrams of this feature (see 1990s example below). Research conducted at the beginning of the 2020s curriculum refresh found, however, that the meaning of this feature could be interpreted differently, and recommended finding a way to communicate learning benchmarks more clearly.

Exploratory work to more clearly accommodate developmental difference in curriculum design had begun some years earlier. Led by Mary Chamberlain, a group of subject specialists and kahui ako leaders had produced a draft framework that signalled the learning that could not be left to chance at different developmental stages. I looked for this paper but couldn’t find it, so I am relying on memory of participation in these workshops (there were several). Subsequently, and in preparation for the refresh, Mary again led a group that explored what a progressions-approach, within a bicultural curriculum, might look like, and a second paper on how such a curriculum might be structured to provide more support for teachers’ judgements of progress. The early stages of the refresh reflected the collaboration and deliberations of the working group by creating a new structure of five developmental stages to be applied to every learning area. For me, it is a loss that this structure was removed from the most recent iterations before its potential to provide greater clarity and support for teachers had been fully explored. It feels to me as if we are back to square one: young teacher me would have been untroubled by lockstep linking of progress to age.

How are learner-centred challenges accommodated?

I have already partially addressed this question with the discussion of developmental progressions. But the huge diversity of our student population brings many other learner-centred challenges for curriculum design.

The 1990s science curriculum responded to new insights about the nature of learning by adopting an explicitly constructivist approach. Every strand began with the phrase “making sense of…” and suggested contexts with the potential to support conceptual learning. These features were intended to serve as a reminder that students actively construct personal meanings in response to learning experiences. Depending on the funds of knowledge they bring with them (from family and cultural backgrounds and personal life experiences) the meanings they construct might not be what the teacher envisaged. It was unfortunate that some people mischaracterised this as a theory of teaching, when it was a theory of learning. This misunderstanding served to reinforce the false binary that either the teacher can teach or they must leave it up to students to figure things out for themselves (as in laisse faire interpretations of inquiry learning). This argument, which I see as a straw man, is still in play, and was also applied to the key competencies when they came along (as in, you can teach competencies or content but not both). I don’t know how well the refreshed learning areas might have responded to this dilemma because work was stopped before their content had been completed, consulted, and refined (all processes that require considerable time and investment). This does feel to me like a loss.

The most recent curriculum developments have removed any suggestions that the curriculum might become more explicitly bicultural. Young teacher me, working in a very middle-class school, would not have even considered the challenge relevant. I have charted my personal learning journey elsewhere, so I won’t go into more detail here. But it does feel like a huge loss that the momentum for change has been stopped just as it was getting going, and that the ground-breaking Aotearoa New Zealand Histories curriculum is being withdrawn, just as it was getting traction.

Finally, I am conscious that I have not addressed curriculum-design challenges for students with specific learning needs. I know some work is being done in this space, but it is outside my area of expertise and professional experience. No doubt I have left other gaps and I invite others to add to the conversation. As I type these final words the song Big Yellow Taxi is playing in my mind: “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”.