Search results

This article reports a study on the relationship between organizational climate and one aspect of school based curriculum development, namely, who makes the curriculum decisions and how. In a systematically selected sample of 20 primary schools in N.S.W., two questionnaire were administered: the Organizational Climate Description Questionnaire (OCDQ) to measure organizational climate, and the Curriculum Decision Making Questionnaire (CDMQ) to determine who makes the curriculum decisions and how. The results indicated a highly significant relationship between the organizational climate factor of principal supportiveness, and curriculum decision making by a group of staff, with group decision making more likely to occur when the principal was supportive. Conversely, there was less likelihood of curriculum decision making by the class teacher acting alone, when the principal was supportive.

Based on the structural theory of tensions between bureaucratic and professional control, many analyses of recent educational reforms argue that teachers and administrators typically adhere to divergent views of governance. Others argue that conflict between administrators and teachers is not inevitable. The degree of competition among professions is affected by the nature of institutional and occupational differentiation and by particular cultural and historical forces in different societies. This study examines the way teachers and principals in a representative sample of Israeli schools view current and preferred control over school curricula in the wake of a decade and a half of decentralization reforms. Our findings show institutional variation in the degree of conflict between the perceptions and preferences of teachers and principals in secondary and elementary schools and major differences in perceptions and preferences by school level. These findings reflect the interplay of occupational segmentation, the functional differentiation of educational institutions, and government policies in Israeli society.

Using Johansson-Sköldberg et al.’s (2013) descriptions of design discourses, this study aims to analyze teacher interviews, research notes and teacher and student artifacts to determine if engagement in design practices led to changes in the teacher’s thinking.

This article presents results from a year-long study that explored how a teacher enacted design discourses to engage in curriculum learning within an elementary school makerspace. The design-based study involved a collaborative partnership where a teacher and researcher co-designed, co-enacted and co-reflected on three cycles of making featuring curriculum studies in science, mathematics and social studies.

The authors determined that engagement in all four design discourses led to transformative changes in the teacher’s thinking about herself as a teacher and her students as learners. The evidence suggests the school makerspace can serve as a liminal design space for professional learning, given that implicit in the makerspace is the embodiment of design practices such as problem finding, iteration and reflection.

Engaging in design discourses in the makerspace can lead teachers to question the frames they hold about teaching and learning. However, teachers need ongoing support in developing discipline knowledge and prioritizing the time required for designing, iterating and reflecting on learning in the makerspace.

The makerspace provides a liminal space for teachers’ professional learning in that implicit in the makerspace is the embodiment of design practices such as problem finding, iteration and reflection.

This study is unique, in that it places the importance of teacher learning in the elementary school makerspace on equal footing with student learning, thereby creating a culture of inquiry for all.

As interventions are disseminated widely, issues of fidelity and adaptation become increasingly critical to understand. This study aims to describe the types of adaptations made by teachers delivering a school‐based substance use prevention curriculum and their reasons for adapting program content.

To determine the degree to which implementers adhere to a prevention curriculum, naturally adapt the curriculum, and the reasons implementers give for making adaptations, the study examined lesson adaptations made by the 31 teachers who implemented the keepin’ it REAL drug prevention curriculum in 7th grade classrooms (n=25 schools). Data were collected from teacher self‐reports after each lesson and observer coding of videotaped lessons. From the total sample, 276 lesson videos were randomly selected for observational analysis.

Teachers self‐reported adapting more than 68 percent of prevention lessons, while independent observers reported more than 97 percent of the observed lessons were adapted in some way. Types of adaptations included: altering the delivery of the lesson by revising the delivery timetable or delivery context; changing content of the lesson by removing, partially covering, revising, or adding content; and altering the designated format of the lesson (such as assigning small group activities to students as individual work). Reasons for adaptation included responding to constraints (time, institutional, personal, and technical), and responding to student needs (students’ abilities to process curriculum content, to enhance student engagement with material).

The study sample was limited to rural schools in the US mid‐Atlantic; however, the results suggest that if programs are to be effectively implemented, program developers need a better understanding of the types of adaptations and reasons implementers provide for adapting curricula.

These descriptive data suggest that prevention curricula be developed in shorter teaching modules, developers reconsider the usefulness of homework, and implementer training and ongoing support might benefit from more attention to different implementation styles.

With nearly half of US public schools implementing some form of evidence‐based substance use prevention program, issues of implementation fidelity and adaptation have become paramount in the field of prevention. The findings from this study reveal the complexity of the types of adaptations teachers make naturally in the classroom to evidence‐based curricula and provide reasons for these adaptations. This information should prove useful for prevention researchers, program developers, and health educators alike.

Investigates the relationship between schools′ administrative styles and the curriculum and teaching practices that occur within them. As part of a wider study conducted into the effects of the decentralization of curriculum decision making in Australia, sampled schools were grouped according to teachers′ perceptions of the extent of autonomy that they were able to exercise. Curricular structures and instructional practices within two discipline areas –science and social science – were then compared across the groupings of schools. The results revealed that the extent of autonomy that teachers perceived they possessed within schools affected both curriculum emphases and instructional practices within the programme in practice although, when asked about curriculum emphases and instructional practices in an ideal programme, there was little difference in the views of the teachers in the different groups of schools.

The paper sets out to analyse the quality education curriculum innovations that have been implemented in Kenya since independence in 1963. The purpose of the analysis is to assess the success and or failure of the innovations and determine the lessons learned that can inform future design and implementation of curriculum innovations designed to improve the quality of education.

This was a desk review of curriculum policy documents and related research literature. The documents analysed included various education commission reports produced by education commissions, committees and task forces appointed to inquire into education and make recommendations to government; primary school syllabuses and related research literature.

The review has revealed that the curriculum innovations recommended and implemented in Kenya have targeted the attainment of the goals of individual and national economic development; national identity and unity; socio-cultural, moral and ethical development; cognitive development and globalization; and psycho-social skills development. Many of the innovations have not been implemented effectively. Impediments to effective implementation have included hasty implementation, limited in-service training for teachers, inadequate ongoing professional support for teachers, and inadequate resources.

Achieving effective curriculum innovation is not easy. It requires greater participation in curriculum decision making, patience in training those in various levels of the curriculum implementation process and enormous resources.

In adopting content analysis as a methodology, the paper constitutes a unique contribution to the study of curriculum innovation in Kenya.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate and analyze the dominant discourses of the workplace curriculum in Iranian organizations.

The research data were collected through in-depth interviews with 30 professionals working in the field of workplace curriculum in three groups of consultants, managers and experts who were selected purposefully and with a theoretical sampling strategy. To analyze the data, thematic analysis method was used. The themes are extracted and categorized into three phases, namely, descriptive coding, interpretive coding and determination of overarching theme. To validate the data, collaborative research technique, member checking and researcher review and, to make sure of findings’ reliability, reliability index between two coders were used.

Based on the findings, the kind of planner’s look at the workplace curriculum commonplaces will shape the nature of the curriculum and in terms of this look define and redefine the workplace curriculum discourses. Therefore, based on perceptions and attitudes in these areas, 11 different discourses are recognizable from the workplace curriculum. These include suppression discourse, justification discourse, ceremonial/ formality discourse, administrative discourse, engineering discourse, economical discourse, psychological discourse, partnership discourse, research discourse, developmental discourse and, finally, multi-cultural discourse.

The common goal of all learning professionals in the workplace is to play the role of a strategic partner, or at least be a good partner for the organization. One of the main challenges of learning and development professionals in the workplace is increase in integration and alignment between learning programs and developmental opportunities with business organization strategies. Achieving this important goal is possible when we have a proper understanding of the current situation and condition. Various situations and conditions are identified and described in the form of 11 discourses. If the authors do not look at the context and proper understanding of the main concepts – The main concepts of each discourse are put into a quill – in which any discourse that was created, the authors will not be able to make the appropriate strategies. A good doctor will hear and understand well before the first thing.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the few studies that offer a variety of discourses for the workplace curriculum.

The purpose of this paper is to find out how organizational and contextual factors affect a curriculum change in a University in Singapore. There is a need to research the processes of educational change in Singapore as rapid changes can result in complex problems. The university is chosen as it is at the forefront of the government's strategy for economic planning. It is also hoped that through this case study investigation of curriculum educational change of this University's Engineering School, the importance of considering people's situations and their roles in the educational change can be highlighted. Previously, students undertook one year of common engineering curriculum when they enrolled in a Bachelor of Engineering program in this University. This has, however, been expanded to a two‐year common engineering program. This study examines the academic staff's collaboration and communication in implementing the curriculum change. This study investigates the organizational factors that influence the academics' communication in a curriculum change.

The research method used is documentary analysis of curriculum, planning and policy documents as well as annual reports.

The interviewees concurred on the points that there should be more consideration of their views on the curricular issues in the University, and that top‐down decisions should be incorporated with bottom‐up input. This study discovers that more attention should be paid to students' learning, particularly in developing skills that will help them adapt to a knowledge‐based economy and rapid economic developments. In general, the academics desired a greater and deeper involvement in decisions on curriculum changes so that they could contribute their professional and pedagogical viewpoints.

This study show the importance of examining the factors that influence academics to change and the stages they go through. It also shows the need to involve academics at every stage of a curriculum change.

Emerging research on education reform in Shanghai for the last decade or so has either focused on broad contexts and trends of the second-cycle curriculum reform or the professional development in response to the reform or a few detailed cases of teaching improvement to meet the reform demand. Little attention has been paid to how schools as institutions have been made to respond to and enact the reform. Through three detailed school cases, the purpose of this paper is to understand their distinctive responses to reform in terms of how they interpreted, enacted and sustained their reform efforts and how more importantly lesson-case study and multi-tiered research projects has become a reinvigorated form of Chinese lesson study and teaching research to significantly mediate the school’s curriculum reform efforts. Features of sustainable development behind these cases are conceptualized by Lave and Wenger’s notion of transparency of the mediating technology of a community of practice.

Drawing on master’s thesis reports of school leaders (2010-2016), school research publications and lesson cases as secondary data sources, an instrumental multi-case research design was adopted to build detailed case narratives and tease out cross-case comparisons.

Building on unique strengths and legacies to solve school problems, the three secondary schools responded to, enacted and sustained the reform in unique ways: case 1, a municipal key school, has focused on “three translations (of curriculum)” involving all teaching research groups (TRGs) in specifying broad curriculum standards and turning them into concrete, actionable designs and student tasks which are tested and refined through iterative cycles of lesson-case study, with the decision making for each translation informed by research projects studying problems arising. Case 2, a district key school, has capitalized on its strong TRGs and used research projects and lesson-case study to unite teaching, research and PD into a whole; and case 3, a regular neighborhood school, has aimed to build a structured PD system to tackle teacher stagnation by stressing the reflection components of each cycle of lesson-case study, challenging teachers to learn in the district-level curriculum integration experiment, and nudging them into their own research projects with well-staged support. In all the three cases, research projects have been networked connecting municipal, district, school and teachers in building a research climate. The lesson-case study has turned designs into refined actions to ensure quality of curriculum implementation and teacher growth.

This study yields insights into the inner workings of Shanghai’s recent curriculum reform. With strategic injection of research into the familiar institutional structures and organic cultural forms of collegiality, school innovations can be built on familiarity to create a sense of continuity, coherence and institutional identity so that teachers learn from doing with least disruption. The slow and steady work of sustaining innovations and reform goes beyond simple notions of scaling up and relies on building internal drive and institutional and teacher capacity for deep learning in responding to reform.

The purpose of this paper is to examine early career teachers’ Socialized Knowledge Communities (SKCs) as they relate to the pursuit of mathematics knowledge and teaching. The authors investigate Pinterest, a living data archive, as an opportunity to view teachers’ sense-making and construction of instructional resources. Through this lens, the authors examine how teachers form and share mathematical meaning individually and collectively through professional collaboration.

This work characterizes teachers’ curation of mathematical resources both in the kinds of mathematics teachers are choosing and the quality therein. Finally, the authors examine through epistemic network analysis how teachers are sense-making through a statistical approach to identifying their organization of mathematics curation by typology and cognitive process demand.

Results show that sampled teachers predominantly curate instructional resources that require students to perform standard algorithm and represent mathematics relationships in visualization within Pinterest. Additionally, the authors find the resources curated by teachers have lower cognitive demand. Finally, epistemic networks show teachers make connections among instructional resources with particular types as well as with different levels of cognitive demand as they sense-make their curated curriculum. In particular, difference in teachers’ internal consideration of the quality of tasks is associated with their years of experience.

Twenty-first century classrooms and teachers engage frequently in curation of instructional resources online. The work contributes to an emergent understanding of teachers’ professional engagement in virtual spaces by characterizing the instructional resources being accessed, shared, and diffused. Understanding the nature of the content permeating teachers’ SKCs is essential to increase teachers’ professional capital in the digital age.