The context of curriculum reforms and educational development interventions

In the year 2000, the European states have agreed through signing the Lisbon Strategy to aim at creating “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion”

(European Parliament, 2000). This has set the stage for both learning and innovation in education, even at the pre-tertiary levels. The notion of lifelong learning as a policy direction was emphasised, especially through adult education as either professional (re)qualification or continuous professional development. This emphasis might have come as a confusion because as a beautifully simple idea, Field (2006) points out that it is obvious that people learn across the whole span of their lives and this is not limited to the planned instruction provided by an institution. He notes that one “cannot stop [one]self from being a lifelong learner […] [b]ut lifelong learning is also a way of thinking about and structuring our society’s approach to education” (Field, 2006, p. 2). Therefore, placing lifelong learning as a political intervention points out to the fact that occupations are ever-changing and non-predictable thus individual capacity to change the ways of working through learning new skills and adopting new attitudes is of utmost importance (Field, 2006).

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For understanding the educational reforms in European countries today it is important to understand their connection to the larger European agendas, and one particularly important for the field of teacher learning and innovation is lifelong learning. The policies of lifelong learning often promote partnerships between state and civil stakeholders working together on the common objectives as Field notes, and he adds:

achievements of modernity are placing the existing education and training system under enormous pressure. Three key factors in particular appear to be driving the desire for change:

the ever-increasing speed with which knowledge is applied to practice; the ever-greater capacity if new technologies to process and transmit information; and the powerful impact of globalisation tendencies (2006, p. 23).

The factors mentioned above translate to national policy-making in one way or another, but producing a coherent policy and strategy is not always the case. Especially when addressing a term that is so broadly contested and undetermined as innovation. Thus, the term comes multiple times without a clear understanding and without a coherent framework. Furthermore, unlike in the private sector, for majority of schools innovation is not viewed as a crucial factor for survival which makes it more of an option or luxury, one that comes with high risk and very few incentives (Hannon, 2007).

Nevertheless, most nations around the world constantly implement some sort of an educational reform all the time, and these reforms span from having a focus on skills development, enhancing ICT literacy, concentrating on entrepreneurial skills or environmental literacy, and so on (Sidorkin & Warford, 2017). However, as Sidorkin and Warford note “[t]he problem of preparation for nonroutine cognitive work is difficult to address, for we have not yet learned how to measure skills that include critical and creative thinking and emotional and social intelligence” (Sidorkin & Warford, 2017, pp. 1–2).

Another issue with reforms and public policy interventions is that they come along with political terms and in many cases do not last long enough to become measurable. Attempting to implement innovation through public policy interventions also means understanding how the communication of ideas (of the innovation) moves through different levels and stakeholders. This was pointed out by van den Akker et al. (2005) in the following table.

Table 3: Typology of curriculum representation

Intended

Ideal Vision (rational or basic philosophy underlying a curriculum

Formal / Written Intentions as specified in curriculum documents and

59 / or materials

Implemented

Perceived Curriculum as interpreted by its users (especially teachers)

Operational Actual process of teaching and learning (curriculum-in-action)

Attained Experiential Learning experiences as perceived by learners Learned Resulting learning outcomes of learners Source: van den Akker et al. (2005)

The presented table provides sense about existing gaps between policy and implementation, but also between what is implemented and what is attained, thus when creating a policy measure it is important to understand that what was ideally configured at the beginning and placed in the form of documents and materials, might not necessarily be what the final outcome will be.

The inputs from the Rand Change Agent Study related to the public policy interventions, and particularly those inspiring innovative practices, provided additional understanding on how to shift towards having public policy that is more appreciative and understanding of local, grassroots processes (McLaughlin, 1990). The Rand analysis found out that within the implementation process and in cases where innovation has successfully rooted into the school culture, adoption of the intervention was merely a beginning. Thus, adoption of the innovation needed to be followed by a strong localised adaptation of the proposed changes which might not be easily visible within the greater picture (McLaughlin, 1990). Therefore, it can be argued that the processes that follow localisation of an innovative intervention from a macro level to the micro involve and depend on the capacities of teacher professional learning and adaptability of school leadership.

Furthermore, the ways in which the school will react to the implementation process was well elaborated by Snyder et al (1992) who worked with a pre-existing idea of polarised perspectives, including fidelity perspective and mutual adaptation perspective. The third dimension was brought in that is formulated through “evolving constructions of teacher and students enactment” of the proposed curricular change (Snyder, Bolin, & Zumwait, 1992, p.

402). Table 4 illustrates the important differentiations between the three implementation perspectives which particularly focus on the teachers and their role.

60 Table 4: Perspectives of curriculum implementation

Fidelity perspective Mutual adaptation perspective

Curriculum enactment perspective Produced by experts and specialists for teachers to

implement through given instruction

Developed through joint engagement of teachers and

students

• Heavily structured approach

• Role of teacher:

passive recipient who is / will be trained to transmit the content

• Teachers given instruction on how to implement content

• Alterations can be made during the procedures

• Involves a compromise between the developers and the implementers

• Curriculum provided by an external body / institution

• There is no strict instruction

• The syllabus and the

material considered as tools for both teachers and learners when they engage in enacted classroom experience

Source: Snyder et al. (1992)

The idea that the role of teacher is of particular significance for the implementation of curricular change is rather obvious; from the perspective of being a passive receiver of an instruction to the concept in which the instructions, including the syllabus, are used as tools for creating new working and learning experiences, it is the teacher that initiates and transitions the idea and the working morale to the classroom.

Another important aspect of assessing the processes of innovative interventions and their implementation is through defining them from a perspective of macro, meso and micro levels.

A Hungarian study that investigates the birth and spread of innovative practice in education has developed a framework which recognises 4 types of innovative interventions regarding their source, how they develop and spread. Two types are categorised as emerging through a top-down process and they include external public development interventions (supported and promoted by national governments and other public bodies) and external non-public interventions initiated by charities, academies, private bodies, or similar (Halász & Fazekas, 2016).

The other two types reflect a bottom-up approach to innovation development, including occasions of internal and external incentives at the single institution level. These two have been sub-categorised into:

• Internal incentive innovation development based on a conscious experimentation

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• Internal ad hoc solutions to problems faced in practice

• Externally stimulated and inspired practices without aimed coordination or networking

• Externally stimulated and inspired practices coordinated through frameworks such as different school networks and partnerships (Halász & Fazekas, 2016).

By looking at this framework through the ideas of willingness to innovate (Schleicher, 2015) it can be assumed that the most intrinsic and possibly best stimulated school-level innovations appear in the two latter types of bottom-up approaches, notwithstanding the fact that even in top-down interventions willingness to innovate and / or to embrace innovations will emerge.

In light of that, it is important to remind of the processes of implementation and absorption of innovative interventions (McLaughlin, 1990; Snyder et al., 1992). This notion strongly connects to the capacity of creating 21^st century learning environments, through collaboration, coherence, and opportunities to innovate (Schleicher, 2015), but also to the capacity of creating professional learning communities (Giles & Hargreaves, 2006; Andy Hargreaves, 2007).

Therefore, a school’s disposition towards knowledge is a critical element that determines its innovative aptitude, and it is argued that this specific environmental characteristic is closely connected to the way schools are managed and led, as well as to the quality of the teaching staff.

It is easy to conclude that the quality of teachers will impact the quality of schools, and for this the education system in its entirety needs to be coherently ambitious and synchronised towards achieving this aim (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017). Through a detailed examination of the most successful education systems in the world, Darling-Hammond et al (2017) point out the important measures that need to be taken at the initial teacher education and recruitment level, through establishment of a system that allows for further continuous development and professionalism. The recently published European study on policies to support, develop and incentivise teacher quality (European Commission, 2018a), stands in agreement with this and also points out the evident need of enhancing the social status, prestige and attractiveness of the teaching profession among other things. Another highly questionable and deeply related issue is the one of teacher evaluation. Work performance and teacher evaluation is usually tightly connected to quality standards that guide teacher education in general. But in order for teacher evaluation to work in favour and not against innovation and continuous learning, the

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evaluation system needs to support and help teachers to improve their practice, with a more formative elements and peer-appraisals (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017).

Furthermore, to accomplish the goal of having schools as model learning organisations and teaching as a learning profession, “the systems [need to] provide teachers with time to work with and learn from colleagues and to conduct their own research to test and measure the effects of innovative practices” (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017, p. 105). The analysis of the countries that have successful policy implementation of innovative educational provisions shows that teachers are allowed and encouraged to collaborate and observe others’ practices, engage in research about practice, share and discuss findings with colleagues. Their worktime includes these activities therefore they are not an extra burden but integrated into the daily work scope (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017).