2020 Curriculum

When I talk to teachers about the school curriculum, whether primary or secondary, guess what they want to discuss the most? Correct - assessment. When I crowdsourced for material for this series of blog posts on #learning2020, a lot of the comments I received back were about assessment. It's no surprise that Teachers hate it (marking is time consuming and not particularly useful, given the effort involved) just as much as children hate it (threatening, stressful, not very helpful for their learning). Just about the only people who love assessment are the government and the organisations who ... er, organise assessment. I have ranted several times recently on this blog about the difficulties of standardised assessment, and we have had interesting and thought provoking discussions here on alternative assessment methods. What kinds of assessment will there be in 2020? Will they be different from today, or will we (perish the thought) be lumbered with useless, discriminatory and impractical testing for years to come? Here's what you said:

Madeleine Brookes, technology integrator and ITGS teacher in Beijing, China, predicted that we will move from handwritten exams to online submission, which I think is a reasonable position to take. Regardless of the issues of verifiability of students and technical issues, online submission seems to be an advance on current exam systems. Others, including Ollie Bray, Scotland's National Advisor for emerging technologies, and Adrian Bradshaw, and ICT subject leader in Plymouth, England, made suggestions that assessment as we know it will be completely obsolete by 2020. Whilst I can't second guess their reasoning behind this, I assume it's because assessment in its current form does not prepare learners for the future, and it certainly doesn't add much to their experience of learning in school. Adrian went as far as to suggest that the National Curriculum as we currently know it will face the axe - because again, it is inadequate for the needs of learners. David Truss (an educator based in Dalian, China) agreed, arguing that curricula are overload and should be changed, but admitted that it will probably take a long time.

I agree, school curricula are overloaded with too many subjects and too much content which places too much pressure on the teacher to cover everything in the available time. This tends to militate against time and space available for learners to play, experiment, and ask the 'what if...' questions. Creativity can be stifled, particularly if the teacher slips into an instruction mode as a strategy to simply 'get through' all the content. Julian Wood, a primary educator in Sheffield, England, has a solution to this problem - He suggests we should adopt 'child led learning where the curriculum is dominated by skills needed for future employment.' Too much over-reliance on grades is another problem. Why do we force children to jump through so many hoops? We're not all Physical Education teachers are we? (That was a joke, btw - some of my best friends are PE teachers). Children should not be misled into thinking that getting high grades assures them a good job. It doesn't. So who are the grades for? They certainly help the government to obtain a clear picture of 'how a school is performing'... Go figure.

I will leave the last word to Adrian Bradshaw: 'I hope in future [the] curriculum will focus on creativity and thinking and not destroy divergent thinking'. Amen to that.

Image source Exam tables in sports hall, Epsom College by David Hawgood


2020 Curriculum by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.