Plea for a teacher-friendly national curriculum

The AEU has called for a broad, realistic national curriculum that values the teachers who will have to implement it.

The call came in the union’s submission to the National Curriculum Board, made in response to the board’s The Shape of a National Curriculum: A Proposal for Discussion.

According to the submission, the curriculum should:

• be based on the assumption that all students can learn, that every child matters, and that students develop at different rates
• build firm foundational skills for the development of advanced studies in academic disciplines
• be feasible and realistic, taking into account the time required to learn complex concepts and ideas
• leave room for important learning areas not part of the national curriculum
• allow jurisdictions, systems and schools to implement it in a way that values teachers’ professional knowledge and reflects local contexts
• be based on a strong evidence base of learning and pedagogy and should encourage teachers to experiment with and evaluate their practices.

The curriculum should provide young Australians with:

• a solid foundation of skills and knowledge on which further learning in adult life can take place
• deep knowledge and skills that will enable advanced learning and an ability to create new ideas and translate them into practical solutions
• general capabilities that underpin flexible and critical thinking, a capacity to work with others and an ability to move across subject disciplines to develop new expertise.

The task of any curriculum, the submission continues, is to ensure that teachers have the support, materials, knowledge and capacity to deliver effective lessons to their students, regardless of their backgrounds. A national curriculum will not in itself raise standards. That requires system support, resourcing, and providing teachers with what they need to do their jobs properly.

The curriculum should include an understanding of the qualitative and complex nature of learning in the 21st century. This requires a broad curriculum with multiple objectives, including the development of interrelated skills, knowledge and concepts and the ability to apply them in real life situations, not just a few “basics”.

Literacy, numeracy and information and communication technology skills are essential to participation in modern society, and every effort must be made to ensure that all students develop these capabilities. Indeed teachers need targeted professional development to teach literacy and numeracy in the context of specific subject areas, and the demands should be specified in the national curriculum.

However, these skills are not of themselves sufficient. All students should have access to other forms of learning, including critical thinking and higher order skills, as well as an understanding of the major fields of human knowledge.

There is no point in increasing national consistency if it results in a downgrading of curriculum quality, a narrowing of student learning options, lowest common denominator expectations and another overlay of bureaucratic accountability.

An overly standardised curriculum is likely to lead to further difficulty in engaging those already with low achievement standards. In turn, those standards should be realistic, based on the knowledge and skills students actually achieve. They should be assessed using methods that value teacher professional judgement and acknowledge complexity, rather than simply being based on limited test or metrics based measures.

Teacher education must be at the centre of the implementation of a national curriculum, and will only work if support is made available to teachers to work with, adapt and implement it. This should be proactive and value teacher judgement and professionalism, avoiding deficit models of performance and development based on intrusive oversight, micromanagement and blame. It should involve effective professional development, including time releases, and provision of time for teachers to properly plan, adapt and implement curriculum.