OBE lessons from SA

They helped educators elsewhere expand what came to be called ”the conditions of success” in their schools and classrooms. Their absence from the South African version of OBE meant that its educators never had the benefit of learning or implementing the very things that were making OBE practice effective elsewhere. These four principles, operating in concert, are bound to improve instruction and learning, whether the approach is called OBE.

Lesson 3

The national education policy of 1997 was represented and viewed almost exclusively as a ”curriculum reform” – not as a ”fundamental system change”. And that led to a profoundly incomplete implementation strategy, one that assumed that teachers simply needed to be taught some new instruction and assessment techniques (in an ever more distorted cascading ”training” process) and everything else would fall into place. This narrow orientation to what was actually a deep paradigm-shifting change model fell short on at least four counts:

Lesson 4

Related to this huge challenge of change was the entrenched ”institutional inertia” that has surrounded educational practice throughout the world in the twentieth century. This inertia in thinking, terminology, structures and practice maintains and reinforces what I’ve referred to many times as the ”CBO syndrome”: curriculum-based outcomes, ­content-bound objectives, calendar-based opportunities, cellular-based organisation, contest-biased orientations, convenience-based operations, convention-bound obsolescence and compliance-based obedience. Any attempt at changing anything of significance in education – not just implementing ”real” OBE – will be diluted/distorted/­compromised by first being forced through this perceptual and operational filter, which I call ”edu-centrism”. If an innovation doesn’t fit this time-based/grade-level/subject-focused educentric pattern, it is sooner or later eliminated. This is why Curriculum 2005 essentially kept all the familiar/entrenched CBO aspects of traditional schooling in place while attempting to install OBE – something that required a profoundly different constellation/paradigm of understandings, structures and practices. Further change efforts will ­certainly be put to the same test, so be ready.

Lesson 5

There was little attention paid to how the concept of ”outcomes” had evolved abroad in the decade prior to 1997. That ever-expanding evolution – from micro to macro thinking and practice about outcomes as ”demonstrations of learning” requiring competence, not just content memorisation – carried with it enormous implications about the nature of learning and learning processes, the critical role of ”competence” and its many forms in learning, the design and implementation of learning experiences, the ”authentic” assessment of learning performance, and the transformation of marking and record keeping systems. This is why OBE in North America took very different forms in the early 1990s, forms that we called traditional (the most micro and content specific), transitional (broader and more content integrated), and transformational (most macro and trans-disciplinary). The technical advice that the national department got about OBE prior to and during 1997 was almost exclusively traditional, which nicely fit the prevailing CBO orientation that was already entrenched throughout the system. That orientation is even more apparent in the Revised National Curriculum Statement that replaced Curriculum 2005, leading directly to the final two reasons/lessons to be learned about OBE in South Africa.

Lesson 6

As you might expect from the foregoing, there was, from the outset, a major misunderstanding in Curriculum 2005 around the term ”transformation”. To South Africans it was about democratising the country and meant opening the education system to those who had been systematically excluded from its benefits under apartheid. In OBE circles abroad, however, transformation meant employing a future-focused, outside-the-box, life-role approach to outcomes, curriculum, instruction and the contexts where learning and performance should take place. In other words, advanced/transformational OBE spoke directly to the issue of long-term relevance to learners, and it required both a future focus and a learner focus, both of which, from my perspective, 1) should have been embodied directly and concretely in the original Twelve Critical Outcomes, and 2) were the antithesis of CBO and the edu-centric nature of schooling. What was needed then, and is still needed is an integration of both meanings of this term: an outside-the-box and inclusive approach to transforming the system from both its apartheid and edu-centric pasts.

Lesson 7

Actually all six of the foregoing reasons helped to produce and reinforce what has become a nightmare of paperwork for South African educators – teaching, assessing and marking every micro task and assignment in the syllabus as if they were actual ”outcomes of significance”. I have long argued that the real purpose of outcomes is to help a system determine what its ultimate learning priorities are, and to keep both educators and students focused on and moving toward those priorities. However, when what are called outcomes consistently take a micro form, then educators face hundreds of things that someone in authority has declared to be ”essential” and a priority. Soon ”everything that moves” becomes a priority, which eventually leads to ”priority overwhelm”, which, in turn, leads to a total frustration with ”outcomes” and an intense desire to ignore or eliminate them. This same frustrating dilemma faced many North American OBE teachers in the 1970s and 1980s, until they were helped to realise that real outcomes were not embedded on every page of a curriculum syllabus, in every paper-pencil test, or in daily/weekly marks that got added up and averaged in a variety of questionable ways – but were larger abilities and orientations that ”really mattered in the long run” in the lives of students.

That criterion, I would argue, should remain central to all educational decisions in the country. Does what we are teaching and having students ”learn” really matter in the long run, or is it a curriculum detail that will soon be forgotten once exams are over and marks are recorded? This is not an issue about OBE or any viewpoint about it. It’s fundamental to any system that hopes to both equip and empower its students to be successful in the future they face, not just the schools they attended.

Dr Bill Spady is an international consultant specialising in leadership development and paradigm change in education. He is best known in South Africa for his five books and dozens of articles on OBE and educational change

References
Schwahn, Charles, and William Spady. 1998. Total Leaders. Arlington, Va.: American Association of School Administrators.

Spady, William, and Anne Schlebusch. 1999. Curriculum 2005: A Guide for Parents. Cape Town: Tafelberg.

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