The mechanics of a redesigned curriculum

When discussing the design of the curriculum, the mechanics of how you make it work is usually a terrible place to start.

The need to produce something cost-effective that can actually be scheduled by either a human being or a machine is evident, but too often that takes over from the need to craft experiences that provide opportunities for deep learning.  As a school timetabler, I often felt that my office was where the best new ideas about learning came to die as the enthusiast struggled to convince me to reorganise an increasingly fractured and complex curriculum model to fit some new innovative approach or idea. 

Much of the discussion at iNet curriculum design events rightly centres on how we can make the kinds of learning we want to support and promote easier, setting the slope of the playing field, as it were.  A wide range of changes in practice are emerging, discussed in System redesign 3, including:

• questioning the organisation of the school day into 45-minute lessons and using a variety of alternatives
• moving away from birth-date as the primary factor in grouping learners
• considering alternatives to a purely subject-based approach to organising learning
• delegating the day-to-day design of the curriculum much more to teams of staff.

But those very patterns of organisation we are replacing themselves arose from the problem of making the day-to-day operation of the curriculum work, so it is perhaps useful to consider how those underlying systems might themselves be shifting. 

A good starting point is to consider why we have a structure in which each year children are organised into classes of approximately common size and age and take a curriculum that is a mixture of standard and optional parts, set out in advance for the 12 months ahead. A curriculum delivered in a fixed set of classrooms by a team of staff who remain fixed for any given learner for the whole year.

This tightly-coupled approach answers a number of challenges for organising our schools:

• the need to make the organisation of a school understandable to staff and students
• the difficulty of scheduling the curriculum in a cost effective way, given limited resources
• the need for predictable, quality assured outcomes for learners
• the need for a stable and safe environment for each learner.

Will these restrictions continue to apply in the medium to long-term?

Technology already allows us to take highly complex systems and present for each person the appropriate information. It no longer matters how complex the underlying curriculum or timetable structure is, as any person connected with it can access an appropriate picture to make it understandable. 

The need for a ‘super user’ (traditionally, the rather harried vice-principal producing the timetable) to hold a full version of the timetable and all its intricacies in his or her head is already debatable.  Timetable design requires a clear understanding of the rules and decisions to be made. However, this task is better undertaken by a number of stakeholders working together, and automated scheduling will at least match human design within the next few years, if as yet it has failed to do so. 

As automated scheduling improves, it opens the possibility of embracing far more complex, and indeed apparently chaotic structures that can shift whenever needed, rather than when possible.

Are there any examples in your own institution where the way the timetable operates would be impossible without the help of a computerised system? 

Could you have operated your current curriculum with the technology available to you 10 years ago?

In a traditional curriculum model, knowing the group in which a learner is working in a particular subject tells us a great deal about what we expect them to achieve in the months ahead. As learning increasingly becomes co-constructed, this predictability arises less and less from the curriculum model and the timetable and more from the frameworks for learning objectives and their assessment. Each activity still needs to be mapped to an overall plan, as does the progress of the learner, however, the group designation of an individual is no longer especially helpful in deciding what that will be.

As we rethink the support systems we use (as discussed in System redesign 4), the role played by staff in assuring a learner’s wellbeing is shifting, with a number of new roles specifically designed to ensure the support of learning coming into existence.  We can expect systems within schools to provide much greater levels of support customised to the needs of the learner and focused on learning, enabling the learner to become a better informed advocate for their own curriculum planning.

So, if we are no longer faced with the same restrictions to shape our timetable structures, and as schools are increasingly innovating to create far greater flexibility within them, where might we go next?

An interesting parallel is in the world of software development.

Creating modern software is a highly complex endeavour, involving a large number of specialists working to bring together a huge amount of material with a requirement for an error-free result.  As software has become more complex, so the time to write it, and the difficulty ensuring high quality, has stressed the established systems and a new highly innovative alternative has arisen.

An Open Source approach replaces a single, closed structure to create software with a network of individuals. Each has their own motives and expected benefits but they freely interchange work and use their audience of users as the key mechanism to improve quality. This approach has had a massive impact on the industry, displacing traditionally production in some areas and forcing some corporations to radically redesign their own processes including hybrid open/closed source systems.

In his book The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric S Raymond explores, in great depth, this radical switch from very linear ordered processes to highly networked ones.  There are a number of parallels between linear software development and the traditional school curriculum, for example:

• both seek to ensure complete freedom from errors but become increasingly stretched by massive increases in expectation

• both depend on highly skilled and professional hierarchies of professionals carrying out ordered, linear tasks.
• both are anchored to set dates and structures.

So, if the traditional school curriculum/ timetable is analogous to the traditional closed system, what would the open source structure look like in a school organisation?

An envisioning guide published by Microsoft, which explores building schools for the future and personalisation, offers some useful insights. Foreseeing systems capable of scheduling learning on demand, and mapping both planned outcomes and learning gains on an activity-by-activity basis, it postulates the following structure.

• Learners build an individual learning plan dynamically based on the activities on offer and their profile of attainment and targets. The programme depends entirely on need, not age, or even necessarily location. Construction of these dynamic plans is software assisted, and can be managed appropriately by the learner with the active support of staff according the learner’s degree of autonomy.
• Providers design and offer activities. They may be departments or individuals within a school, but they can also be external agencies, workplaces, designers of digital learning content or other students. The single school becomes a wider learning network. All activities are mapped against an agreed framework to allow learners to select the right ones for them and evaluate progress.
• Where activities offered are successful and offer learning gains for the students that take them, they will thrive and develop further. Where they fail to meet the needs of learners, they will need to be redesigned as they will no longer be scheduled by learners. Learning outcomes will drive quality, which will itself determine supply.
• It is perfectly possible within the model for some very traditional structures to exist (such as long periods where a group of learners take a common programme with a single teacher), however they will do so only when it is the most appropriate solution not because ‘the timetable said so’.

There is an oft-repeated tale of the 19 century surgeon who, on being transported to the modern world, is totally disorientated. However, the 19th century teacher, making the same journey, experiences only mild dislocation. This kind of on-demand curriculum structure, provided by a network of people and accessed with the active co-construction between the learner and his or her supporters, would certainly provide the distinctive design to match the 21st century educational imaginary that was totally different from the 19th century factory school.

Links

The Microsoft envisioning guide for building schools for the future can be found at: http://www.microsoft.com/uk/education/building.mspx

Eric S Raymond’s essay, ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’ can be found at: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mr Guy Shearer is Head of Curriculum Design and Innovation at the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT), in London, England, United Kingdom.  Prior to joining the SSAT, he was the Head of the Learning Discovery Centre in Northampton and Deputy Head Teacher, both at the Ferrers Specialist Arts College and at the British Council School of Madrid. He co-authored and edited ICT in the creative classroom (Network Educational Press) and contributed to The big book of independent thinking (Crown House Publishers). More recently, Mr Shearer developed the Curriculum redesign toolkit and co-authored System redesign 3 – curriculum redesign with Professor David Hargreaves, both published by the SSAT.

 

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