Implementation – making the magic happen
This material was originally published in Curriculum Update
No. 39 September 1999 (ISSN 1174 9385)
An extract from an address to the New Zealand Health Teachers'
Association Conference in Dunedin, July 1999 by Mary Chamberlain
– Curriculum Facilitator responsible for health and physical
education.
The way we think about implementation influences how we plan, the
quality of learning experiences we develop, and our daily interactions
with students.
I have called my talk "Implementation – Making the Magic
Happen" because magic involves hard work and preparation, but it
also involves fun, awe, wonder, hope, and being prepared to make
the most of the unexpected.
The challenge for all of us is to see ourselves as promoters of
awe, wonder, and enjoyment as well as promoters of measurable growth.
We need to make sure that the story told by the curriculum has got
something to do with the stories of our students' lives, and we
need to think about our students living, as well as covering, the
curriculum.
When most of us were teenagers, life seemed much simpler. If you
were like me, you might have ridden a Raleigh 20 to school without
a bike helmet and, what's worse, in bell-bottoms that were always
getting caught in the bike chains.
Our preparation for healthy living was often guided by such parental
gems as: values – be good; physical safety – don't sit
too close to the TV and don't fall off your platform shoes; drug
education – if someone gives you a funny-looking cigarette
at a party, don't smoke it; spirituality – don't play rock
music backwards; and sexuality – don't go outside the hall
at school dances.
If we want to prepare students to make health-enhancing decisions,
then we need to do more than dictate answers to the deep questions
of life, whether it is "just say no" or any other ready-made solution.
Questions worth asking
We need to help young people find questions that are worth asking
because the answers they arrive at are worth living. If we don't
do this, then what we call education will be technical and trivial.
In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, when the computer,
Deep Thought, comes up with forty-two as the answer to the ultimate
question of life, the universe, and everything, Loonquawl yells:
"Is that all you've got to show for seven-and-a-half-million
years' work?"
"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that
quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite
honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the
question is."
We could end up with this problem too – " All that work,
and is that all you've got to show for it?" – if we treat
the curriculum as something to be covered and ticked off rather
than as something to be lived.
In the January 1999 edition of Educational Leadership, Parker
Palmer said:
If teachers and students spend their days on things that are
unworthy of the human heart, they will be dragged down by great
sadness.
Implementation nationally and in the classroom
At a national level, we are thinking about implementation in terms
of influencing the conditions that will help the intent of this
curriculum to become a reality in classrooms, schools, and communities.
The biggest challenge is to help people think about what the health
and physical education curriculum means in practice. Wherever I
go, I ask people about the good things that are happening and about
the barriers to implementation.
There are lots of things happening. Secondary teachers are beginning
to plan more collaboratively and are creating explicit links for
students between the subjects of health, physical education, home
economics, and outdoor education. The Curriculum in Action series
of handbooks has been really well received, and many teachers are
using the ideas in these books as a door into the curriculum. Many
schools are planning meetings to invite parents and other members
of the school community to work together to achieve the vision set
out in the curriculum's achievement objectives.
When we discuss barriers to implementation, issues such as provision
of support for the principal, allocation of adequate time on the
timetable, and the interpretation and coverage of achievement objectives
are frequently raised. People say to me "If only the Ministry would
legislate on or make more rules for how the curriculum should be
implemented, everything would be easier." There's a problem here
because you can't legislate for excellence. You can't legislate
for anything that relates to hearts and minds, and you certainly
can't legislate for the kinds of change that we want to bring about
through the health and physical education curriculum. So what's
the alternative?
An invitation to share the vision
Educationalist Louise Stoll says that we all need to be invitational.
She suggests that we need to invite ourselves and others to participate
in achieving the vision. We need to invite ourselves personally
to participate through self-evaluation, reflection, risk taking,
and investigation of our own mental models. We need to invite
ourselves professionally through reading, researching, and staying
current. We need to invite others personally through relationships
based on respect and trust and a vision based on optimism, and
we need to invite others professionally to share leadership and
to maintain momentum and constancy of purpose.
Seeing the big picture
It's important that we all see what an effective health programme
could and should be because what and how we learn
is fundamentally changed by why we learn.
We need to see achievement objectives as setting the direction
for learning without dominating the process. We need to resist becoming
technicians who mechanically develop specific learning outcomes,
tick coverage boxes, and think that, somehow, ticks in all the boxes
and a bunch of policies and papers in the filing cabinet add up
to quality learning.
We need to resist skating across the curriculum in superficial
ways, as this may lead to what the late Garth Boomer described in
"Negotiating the Curriculum Reformulated"
as "mirages of learning as opposed to real oases".
We need to plan learning experiences, keeping the big picture in
mind, not atomising the curriculum and somehow hoping that the sum
of the parts will add up to the whole. The question that underpins
every classroom activity and interaction with students should be
"How will this help students to make healthier decisions for themselves
and other people?"
It's a bit like a jigsaw puzzle, really. These are hard to do without
a vision of what all the bits add up to. Having the image on the
lid guides you when you're putting the puzzle together. It's OK
for different people to start in different places and have different
ways of putting the jigsaw together.
Planning is like completing a puzzle, guided by the larger picture.
We don't have to start with an achievement objective, then write
a learning outcome, design an activity, teach it, and then assess
it. That's taking our outcomes-based curriculum back to the model
of the 1960s.
Planning for success
Planning just like learning can start anywhere. You might start
planning with a resource, an assessment activity, a wonderful idea
for an activity that you know will motivate your students, an important
question or topic, or by making the most of a current event. Whatever
your starting point you will need to consider all elements at some
stage (achievement objectives, topics, contexts, assessment tasks,
resources, and learning experiences). The point is, it doesn't have
to be a linear process.
Significant learning doesn't usually happen in linear, compartmentalised
sequences. It's more erratic and episodic, the result of a whole
lot of experiences. I've never seen anyone put a jigsaw puzzle together
by starting at the top left-hand corner and working down or across!
Motivating life-long learners
If we are serious about creating life-long learners, we need to
motivate our young people so that they want to learn and so that
they want to go on learning. The search for meaning and purpose
is crucial to motivation – we call it intrinsic motivation.
When we talk about basics, intrinsic motivation has got to be there
– you can't get more basic than that.
Inspired teaching is felt and experienced. It can happen anywhere
when people are committed and caring. It puts aside the cynicism
that distances teacher from learner and focuses on nurturing, despite
the odds. It happens everyday in hundreds of classrooms.
We must constantly endure that the bigger picture is being realised
in every interaction, from discussions in the staffroom to daily
contact with students, from the resolution of playground disputes
to arguments about timetabling. Because, as Walt Whitman says in
"There Was a Child Went Forth":
There was a child went forth everyday
And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became,
And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part
of the day,
Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.
A final reflection
Reflect: take a moment to think about your health programme. Draw
two columns on a piece of paper. In one column, list three words
that students, parents, or other teachers might use to describe
your health programme. In the other column, list three words that
you would like them to use.
Think about the words you have written down. Were there any words
that had something to do with the curriculum? Were any informed
by something about your students' learning needs, and were any informed
by intuition or hope?
References
1 Garth Boomer, (1994). Negotiating
the Curriculum Reformulated, in Negotiating the Curriculum
Editors G. Boomer, N. Lester, C. Onore, and T. Cook London: Falmer
Press. Return to place in text.
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