Designing the Classroom Curriculum Designing the Classroom Curriculum | Page 16

Designing the Classroom Curriculum
impinge on the core activity, in our case, teaching practice. This is the essence of having the capability to
engage in continuous improvement. In a recent study of school leadership and student outcomes, Lynch et
al. (2015) found that alignment between the school strategy and teacher's beliefs, engagement by the whole
staff with the strategy and relevant capabilities to reach the school's strategic aims were critical factors for
school reform. With these in place, continuous improvement is a process of sustained incremental problem-
solving, within an established language of instruction, in collegial clusters that become established as
innovation routines in the school. New teachers are then inducted into the framework and its logic rather
than having to make their way anew.
It is also important to understand that while individuals will have various ways of thinking about
schools and how they do the core practice of teaching, the evidence is that a single, unified approach across
the whole school is more likely to encourage enhanced student learning outcomes. Marzano (2008) for
example argues that having such a comprehensive model in which everyone talks about teaching in the same
way communicates the message that “We are serious about good teaching…” 3
In such an approach, it is often said, individual professionals might have to put aside some of their most
deeply held beliefs and practices in order to contribute to the established ‘language of instruction’. Many
teachers, it is said, see this as a restriction of their professional autonomy. The fact is that most teachers will
have to sideline some beliefs and practices in order to participate in schools where reform around effective
teaching is underway. The idea of the ‘thousand flowers blooming’ is not part of the approach to enhancing
student learning being proposed here. Its major challenge is that proposed by Kirschner et al. 2006, p.27):
In so far as there is any evidence from controlled studies, it almost uniformly supports direct, strong
instructional guidance rather than constructivist-based minimal guidance during the instruction of
novice to intermediate learners.
This tension is not new to schools or to other organizations. One of the great mysteries of organizational
management explored by Pfeffer and Sutton (2000, p. 4) is the disconnection between what is known to
work in organisations and the action of organisational leaders and workers. They ask, “Why does knowledge
of what needs to be done so frequently fail to result in action or behaviour that is consistent with that
knowledge?” Put another way, any instructional recommendation that does not or cannot specify what has
been changed in long-term memory, or that does not increase the efficiency with which relevant information
is stored in or retrieved from long-term memory, is likely to be ineffective as a learning approach.
In the present era of schooling, one might well ask this of Australian schools with stand-out exceptions,
especially when the academic performance of remote schools is analysed. While such schools are special
cases in the national school environment, their consistent failure to deliver effective teaching to generations
of students and their communities are a kind of canary in the cage indicator of the need for a drastic rethink
of how school education is conducted. This issue comes down to policy makers, teachers and school leaders
asking at what point does the future of their students lie in the hands of school repeating the mistakes of the
past and teachers pursuing their own interests?
3
See: http://www.iobservation.com/iobservation/Common_Language_of_Instruction/
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