Education expert responds to curriculum changes

Sarah Macdonald:  The NSW Government is going to become the first state in Australia to mandate explicit instruction throughout its curriculum. ... So how different is it to what we’ve become accustomed to in the past?

Geoff Masters: What the changes mean currently is that the curriculum will be very clear about what students are to learn. The curriculum will provide a pathway that all students need to follow.  The pathway will make clear what it means to … develop more sophisticated knowledge, deeper understanding, higher levels of skill over time in a subject.

If we want to lift performance in our schools – and this was the recommendation of my report – we need a curriculum that makes very clear what teachers should be teaching, what students should be learning and we should focus on what’s really important in subjects.

SM: It will make our (NSW) curriculum more similar I understand to other countries that are very good at maths and science.  Is that true?

GM: Yes. If you look at high performing countries as I have since I did the review, what you see is that these high performing countries are clear about what students should be learning and the sequence that they should be learning.

The other point I’d like to make clear ... is that a high quality curriculum … is part of what’s needed, but the other thing that’s required is high quality teaching.

By that I mean teachers need to be able to establish where students are in their learning, understand where individuals are up to and what difficulties they’re experiencing, what mistakes their making, what misunderstandings they’ve developed and teaching to those points so they’re addressing individual needs. 

The reason that’s so important is that students are at many different points in their learning; there are many different students in our schools … who have been taught what they’re not ready to learn because they lack the prerequisites and some others no doubt who being taught what they already know and are not being stretched. 

If you’re clear about the pathway of learning and you have good assessments of where students are then you can target your teaching to where individuals are at to promote their further learning. The thing that doesn’t work we know is if teachers are expected to teach the same things to the same students for the same amount of time, using exactly the same method. That’s not the way to move forward – to lift standards. 

Teaching is a much more professional activity than that, where teachers need to understand where students are at and then decide on the best ways to promote further learning.

SM: I’m getting some texts saying my partner’s a primary school teacher and they think the curriculum’s even more crowded … . Is there less in the curriculum or more in the curriculum?

GM: I’m not across the detail of what’s been done over the last couple of years, but I am clear on what my recommendation was based on what teachers were telling me. In many syllabuses there was a need to reduce … the things that students were expected to memorise and focus instead on … the important concepts, principles and methods of the subject that develop usually over extended periods of time.

SM: I’m getting other texts saying I’ve been a teacher for 40 years, now retired. Explicit instruction has been around for many years; it’s in our quality teaching framework ... so how is this different?

GM: It’s different in that it’s underpinned by a curriculum that makes it quite explicit what all students are expected to learn and there’s an expectation that teachers will teach that. Now that’s very easy for people to say teachers haven’t been teaching explicitly. The truth is that most teachers do teach explicitly; we know that’s important but it’s also important that teachers don’t interpret this as ‘I have to teach the same thing to the same students for the same amount of time in the same way’. That’s not the answer.

SM: How do you ensure with these changes that you don’t turn students into just passive learning machines? You also have to develop their own creativity and initiative and questioning, don’t you?

GM: Absolutely, that’s really important and why the curriculum has to be much more than just a lot of material to be memorised. We need to be clear that we’re trying to develop those thinking skills – that we want students to be innovative and creative.

So firstly, we need to identify those as important outcomes of the learning process, but we also need … teaching practices that are not simply based on delivery. The last thing we want is a teacher standing in front of a room just delivering the same thing to everybody at the same time for the same amount of time.