Ewan’s question…. room for discussion.
Ewan asks the following question of NZbloggers about our national curriculum:
I saw the official spiel on all this: what does the new ‘flexible curriculum’ mean for working teachers in NZ?
It got me thinking about where our ‘flexible curriculum’ is up to. If my school is anything to go by it means that we have permission to return to ‘thematic study’ where “we are all best suited…aren’t we?”
NO!!!! The flexible nature of our curriculum, I think, is a development towards the foci shifting from ‘knowledge facts about’ to ‘developing skills for..’
It is the intension that New Zealanders become ‘life-long’ learners, capable if not willing to be adaptible to the opportunities presented by the challenge of the changing workplace.
This means that teachers need to demonstrate this in their approach to teaching, modelling it for their students, it is a long, long journey we are on but the flexible curriculum opens us up to new possibilities in the design and creation of our school curriculums.
Most schools, I’d assume, are nervous of this new freedom…. It appears to be a little less ordered, a little more chaotic, a little less stuctured for the ’teaching masses’…. ”after all we have behavioural issues here, I kids wouldn’t cope!”
Not sure this helpful to Ewan…. but it’s something to think about all the same.
but know I Googled it and came up with stuff on languages…. so maybe I’m talking rubbish!
Whatever ‘Flexible Curriculum’ is it appears we could just make it up
I think the difficulty is that the teachers who want the ‘thematic study’ stuff are not life long learners themselves so I don’t know how they will ever shift. They want to be spoon fed information rather than finding out themselves… they obviously didn’t receive the life long learner education in their education and that is why we have to change - otherwise it will be more of the same forever!
As I’ve just heard in Brian Crosby’s presentation at K12 online “Do something new; learning is messy.” Teachers that insist that kids wouldn’t cope with a less predictable curriculcum mean that they wouldn’t.