National President, New Zealand Principals’ Federation
The Ministry of Education’s Curriculum refresh is underway with a stated purpose to ensure curriculum is clear about the ‘learning that can’t be left to chance’. Curriculum is important, as each curriculum discipline delineates national goals, but any robust national education system must join curriculum to pedagogy. To understand the pedagogical change that needs to occur to respond to our current achievement challenges we need to return to the intent of the New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) mandated in 2007. Underpinning the 2007 NZC was a recognition that the vast quantities of new knowledge generated by the information age made the learning of formal discrete knowledge in each curriculum discipline an impossible task. It was felt that knowledge should be generated in ‘just in time’ settings rather than ‘just in case’ it was needed. Within this approach, knowledge reflected curriculum contexts that were localised and problem based. An explicit goal of the NZC was its generic design (think Essence Statements) that required the application of local contexts so that relevant local knowledge goals could be joined to national ‘big picture’ curriculum statements. This process of localisation favoured giving students significant control over their learning. Students were able to decide what they learned about and this sometimes meant that core discipline knowledge that did not reflect a student driven context, was not taught. Professor Gert Biesta writes about this when he identified the ‘learnification’ of our education system. In such systems, preeminence is given to learning rather than teaching. Teaching has a capricious connotation and is almost seen as a process that somehow disenfranchises students in that it imposes knowledge on young people in the form of teaching and learning goals. In a recent televised debate on the nature of New Zealand’s achievement challenges, I noted the tension implicit in the debate about who owns the knowledge – the learner or the teacher? The debate was evenly split with traditionalists stacked on one side advocating for clear, explicit teaching goals and deliberate acts of teaching within an unambiguous curriculum. On the other side were the progressivists who were flying the flag of localised, inquiry approaches rooted in context and culture. It was a shame that the debate encouraged such a simplistic organising principle between teaching and learning. We tend to fall to the binary response when dealing with complex ideas. The truth is that it is not one or the other, it is both! Clear, explicit, discipline-based teaching goals are important and so too are pathways to help students make sense of knowledge in ways that are relevant and meaningful. The alchemy of teaching has never been about letting students
‘learn what they want’ but rather for the teacher to design students into powerful understanding. Of course, the knowledge that underpins that understanding should be curriculum based because that is what a state school system commits to when implementing a national curriculum. We have become overly enamored with student centeredness to the extent that teaching appears to have become a ‘dirty word’. I recently heard about a teacher that did not want to call out faulty thinking in a child’s theory of the world in case they undermined the child and hijacked their theory. Let’s call this out for the nonsense that it is. Young people are immature in their understanding of the world. A teacher’s job is to design young people into new and challenging learning. We know powerful learning occurs when we connect prior knowledge to new knowledge, to work for
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the known into the unknown. Designing young people into Counter to this, New Zealand teachers have never embraced new knowledge does not disable them as learners, it does the a ‘flip-top’ head approach to teaching where the teacher is the opposite, enables them! expert and simply pours their knowledge into the student. We need to urgently confirm the importance of explicit Such an approach ignores the opportunity to help the young teaching goals linked to a clear discipline-based curriculum person make meaning as they experience challenges carefully and then celebrate the incredible talent of our built into the process of learning. Powerful teaching workforce and the many creative ways New Zealand child-centeredness values children’s emerging that they design young people into knowing. theories about the world but never fails to Holding explicit teaching goals should not stop teachers have challenge faulty thinking to drive young people young people joining local context or problem- never embraced towards a deep and appropriate understanding based learning to important curriculum, but of the curriculum. it should occur in an environment where the a ‘flip-top’ head Child-centeredness is an expression of the teacher is crystal clear about the importance value of engaging the child in the process of of deep curriculum learning with strong, approach to learning so that teaching can be informed by purposeful teacher intention. rigorous understanding of the potential and teaching where the afallibility Briar Lipson writing in her book, New of a child’s knowledge to design the Zealand’s Education Delusion has been harshly teacher is the children more expertly into knowing. critical of New Zealand’s commitment to childWe need to rediscover our mettle as teachers, centered schooling. If learning whatever you expert and simply confirm the importance of getting clearer about want in an environment of flimsy curriculum pours their the learning that cannot be left to chance, and understanding and without the adequate then join it to teaching that is challenging challenge that arises from careful curated knowledge into and focused on building new knowledge and teaching is what she means, then she has a understanding that is nationally coherent. point. However, any educator that holds such the student. The curriculum refresh is occurring, so now a view of child-centeredness in a New Zealand let’s seize the opportunity to power up teacher context is simply supporting a laissez-faire way of working. knowledge of curriculum, the importance of teaching, and an Such an approach has no place in our education system. appropriate and rigorous understanding of child-centeredness.
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