Curriculum should serve the teacher  

Tekst Michiel van Nieuwstadt - Redactie Onderwijsblad - 30 juni 2023 - 9 Minuten om te lezen

Nino Maissouradze

While the cabinet is trying to speed up the renewal of the educational curriculum, 64 primary schools of four Dutch school boards have already started. In the Nederlands Kennis Curriculum (NKC) they combine business subjects with reading comprehension because scientific research shows that the two are inextricably linked. The curriculum focuses on the step-by-step development of knowledge.

But what knowledge should that be? “That is of course the key question of every curriculum,” says education researcher Daniel Muijs. “And the answer to that question is, by definition, controversial. There are so many stakeholders that things quickly get bogged down.” Muijs is involved in the development of the NKC at the Academica University of Applied Sciences, a privately funded university of applied sciences in Amsterdam.

The core objectives for primary education are vague and meaningless

The failed projects Curriculum.nu (2018-2022) and Education2032 (2016) prove how complicated it is to reach agreement in the Netherlands about what children should know and be able to do. In order not to end up in endless discussion again, Minister of Education Wiersma had announced that he wanted to cut the problem into pieces. He intended to prioritize the development of "clear goals" in basic skills. New core objectives for language and arithmetic should be delivered this year, the minister wrote in a progress report at the end of last year.

The rest of the curriculum will be a matter of later concern, although the minister also wants to make haste with clear objectives for citizenship and digital literacy. Muijs notes 'an acceleration in the dynamics' of educational innovations since the new cabinet took office. Nevertheless, the NKC schools did not want to wait any longer and have made their own decision about the knowledge that is important for children of primary school age. In the first version of the NKC, which was completed last year, 1200 knowledge goals and more than 2800 knowledge descriptions have been worked out about what students from group 1 to group 8 should learn.

Elections

Vera Jongejan has been involved in the development of the NKC from an early stage and currently teaches one day a week for a group 7 at the Singel, a primary school with over 570 pupils at three locations in Schiedam. “The core objectives for primary education are vague and meaningless,” says Jongejan. “As a result, it is unclear what children have to learn to participate in society. That is not such a big problem if you already acquire a lot of knowledge and you go to the museum or library with your parents every week, but it is a problem for students at our schools in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Schiedam . To combat inequality of opportunity, we want to give our students as much knowledge as possible.”

'Well arranged' is one of the themes De Singel works with in groups 7-8. Jongejan says: “We taught children about the Dutch constitution and the Trias Politica. It was also a job for teachers themselves to update their knowledge in that area, but it was worth it. We noticed at the most recent elections that children understood much better what was happening.”

Background knowledge

Curriculum specialist and teacher educator Erik Meester, currently affiliated with Radboud University Nijmegen, was the initiator of the NKC at Academica at the time. “But the development of a curriculum is of course not the responsibility of a commercial party,” he says. "It's the government's job." Meester is concerned about the government's plans to tighten the targets for basic skills in primary and secondary education, without also setting substantive knowledge targets.

“As long as you don't link language to content, you will get stuck in vagueness,” he says. The developers of the Dutch frame of reference for language have fallen into this trap and in the European frame of reference for language, too, this link is insufficiently made, in Meester's opinion: “It just won't get through to the dull brains of policymakers that reading comprehension is not a generic skill. .”

Defining language skills without talking about the content is stupid

Meester illustrates his point with an example of listening comprehension that he encountered himself in the locker room before his weekly jiu jitsu practice. “Two men from our group work at the Ministry of Defense and started talking about it. Suddenly I couldn't make sense of the conversation anymore. Why? Because I didn't know the words and because I didn't have enough background knowledge. That is exactly the experience many young people have when they read the newspaper. For that you not only need to be able to read technically - because that is indeed a generic skill - you also need a lot of general knowledge. I can point them out, all the gaps in vocabulary and background knowledge that a person needs to fill in order to understand a piece about Russia, China or geopolitics in general.” According to Meester, if you set goals for language education, you should not only name the language skills, but also the knowledge area in which you use that language.

Super vague

Core objective 4 for written education in Dutch now reads: 'The pupils learn to find information in informative and instructive texts, including diagrams, tables and digital sources.' “Super vague”, Meester calls these kinds of core goals. “They are platitudes that are of no use to anyone. Please let's formulate more specific goals that describe the powerful knowledge that enables students to later successfully read a party program or leaflet, file tax returns and appeal against a zoning plan, contribute to our knowledge economy.”

You can try to keep everyone happy, but that won't help the teacher

We are working hard on new core objectives, but Meester predicts that these will remain vague and generic, as long as the knowledge that goes with them is not mentioned. Like Muijs, he sees the danger that the discussion about what children should learn, about what should be in the curriculum, will get stuck because stakeholders all want something different. “I understand that it is a very difficult discussion, but defining language skills without talking about the content is simply stupid.”

In the discussions about curriculum revisions so far, Meester misses the teacher's perspective. “You can try to keep everyone happy, but that is of no use to the teacher in the end. The idea of ​​developing a curriculum is, of course, that teachers benefit from it. We need to solve a problem for teachers so that they can practice their profession properly. I miss that service. If the government does not come up with a solid national curriculum, then teachers are at the mercy of the hypes that, for example, lesson method makers like to respond to. The discussion about the importance of civic skills is, in my opinion, such a hype. After all, the fact that children must learn about the Dutch and European constitution is already included in the current core objectives. What do children think of that? Please leave that to them.”

United Kingdom

Both Daniel Muijs and Erik Meester look with interest at the United Kingdom, where the government has formulated mandatory concrete objectives since 1988 for the knowledge of 5 to 16 year olds in twelve domains. Those objectives are quite detailed. For example, for geography they must be able to point out the countries of the world, especially in Europe, or North and South America. Within the domain of history, 16-year-olds should 'know and understand the history of the British Isles as a coherent, chronological story, from the earliest times to the present: how people have shaped the country, how Britain has influenced the world and how it itself has influenced the rest of the world'.

According to Muijs, research shows that such a knowledge curriculum works. “It seems that the UK scores better in the international comparative PISA studies with this curriculum, although you always have to be careful to causally link one to the other. A country like Singapore is also doing very well internationally with a curriculum that is more focused on developing skills.”

'I prefer a bad curriculum with good teachers to the reverse

Meester is convinced that a knowledge-rich curriculum would be a good choice for the Netherlands, but he immediately adds that it is not a panacea. “The teacher has to do it. I prefer a bad curriculum with good teachers to the reverse: a good curriculum with bad teachers. You are not there with a clear curriculum. You also have to pay teachers well, train them well and make the profession attractive. There is still a lot to do on those points in both England and the Netherlands.”

Meester notes that the Dutch government does not have to start from scratch with the development of a knowledge curriculum, despite the failures of Education2032 and Curriculum.nu. So offers The Canon of the Netherlands already an overview of 'what everyone should know about the history and culture of the Netherlands'. “That is a good example, although that canon currently has no formal status in law.”

Meester argues for a min-max curriculum. At least, because it should contain the ambitious knowledge base that Dutch students have to master at a certain age. Maximum because all students should get a 100 percent score on that test. “The ambition should be: Everyone knows this when you are so and so old. That score then replaces the enormously perverse norm-based Cito system with A's, B's, C's, D's and E'tjes.”

Meester does not believe that teachers' autonomy will be affected if they have to achieve these kinds of minimum knowledge objectives with all pupils of a certain age, on the contrary. “As a teacher you can say: I worked my butt off and achieved these goals. See I'm doing it right. I teach kids what they need to learn, so don't bring up those XNUMXst century skills again."