Since late January, 12 working groups have been revising and streamlining Curriculum 2005. I asked a group of Senior Phase teachers in the Northern Province in May what their expectations of this process were.
To begin with, the grade 8 teachers voiced their frustration at having to continue to implement Curriculum 2005 in its present form. They were unhappy about the lack of communication from the Department of Education regarding the status of existing policy in the light of the review of Curriculum 2005 last year. Their main source of information had been the media. Press reports had left them confused about whether or not outcomes-based education (OBE)/Curriculum 2005 was to be scrapped.
I explained the latest state of play to them. OBE had never been under review. It was only the particular form it took in South Africa, namely Curriculum 2005, that had been reviewed. Revised policy, in the form of a National Curriculum Statement, would be made available for public comment at the end of July. After a process of consultation, the National Curriculum Statement would become policy by the end of 2001.
It would take at least two more years for teachers to be trained in this new policy and for new textbooks to be developed. Formal implementation of the revised Curriculum 2005 was therefore only likely to begin in 2004. Curriculum 2005 in its present form would continue to be implemented until it was overtaken by the revised policy.
Several teachers questioned the value of continuing to implement policy that had been found to be flawed. I suggested that it was appropriate for curriculum policy to be continually reviewed. My recommendation, however, was that for the meantime they should work mainly with the Critical Outcomes and the Specific Outcomes. This would provide them with a sufficient policy framework within which to locate their practice during this period of transition.
So what do these teachers expect of the National Curriculum Statement? They were unanimous in expressing the desire to be given a clearer indication of what knowledge and skills they needed to focus on in each grade. “Though we are not supposed to talk about a syllabus anymore”, said one teacher, “at least we knew what we were expected to teach in each grade when we had a syllabus.”
Several teachers expressed a need to be given a clear indication of what the key concerns of each learning area were, and for an outline of the content to be covered in each grade to be provided. They believed that this would result in more uniformity in textbooks in each grade. Currently they felt that what they ended up teaching in each grade was the luck of the draw and depended very much on which textbook they had chosen.
A key area of concern that caused considerable anxiety was not understanding what OBE was. They anticipated that the National Curriculum Statement would provide some explanation of what the principles of OBE were and how these principles should inform their teaching. They also felt completely at sea when it came to dealing with values and attitudes in the curriculum and hoped that much more attention would be given to explaining this aspect.
These teachers spoke with one voice about the need for much greater clarity in the area of assessment. Not one member of the group felt able to explain what the current assessment policy was or how to implement it effectively in any of the eight learning areas. The main reason they gave was that assessment had undoubtedly been the weakest aspect of the training they had received.
On the question of training, their view was that they would not be able to do justice to the new curriculum without receiving regular, high-quality training and on-going school-based support. They expressed this need in all learning areas, but especially in the new learning areas like Economic and Management Sciences and Technology where they often did not know where to start.
Once revised policy that strengthens Curriculum 2005 is in place, the focus will turn to how effectively this policy is able to be implemented. There are many factors that affect implementation. From the point of view of transforming the curriculum, the two that require most urgent attention are teacher development and the development and supply of quality textbooks that support the revised curriculum policy.
A national strategy for teacher development needs to be developed as a matter of urgency. To have any hope of success, teacher development needs to be driven by the government in partnership with higher education institutions, NGOs and private providers. In the first instance, the training that teachers receive should focus on three aspects: deepening learning area knowledge, how to teach and assess in an outcomes-based way, and how to evaluate and select high-quality textbooks.
– The Teacher/M&G Media, Johannesburg, June 2001.