A Curriculum Design Project – applying a model to create coherence for deep learning

Abstract

The challenges for teachers as curriculum designers have been highlighted over the past few decades as curricula internationally have become less prescribed and more generic in nature. Within this context the New Zealand Curriculum and the NCEA offer teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand a particularly high degree of autonomy. While this move to genericism provides increased opportunities for the development of extended teacher professionalism, it also creates challenges for teachers in becoming effective curriculum designers. The Curriculum Design Coherence Model (CDC Model) provides a means to approach curriculum design and is a response to this context of increased genericism as well as to curricular fragmentation, the marginalisation of content knowledge, and an over emphasis on competencies and skills. In the Model, subject concepts provide a cohering mechanism as they are linked to content and to applied competencies. We hypothesise that the explicit bringing together of conceptual and applied knowledge is the key to deep learning, but that deep learning first requires deep design coherence. The Model draws on theoretical work from epistemology, sociology, and cognitive science to achieve this design coherence for deep learning.

In this presentation Barbara and Graham introduce the CDC Model and some examples of curriculum design using the Model. The Model is currently being trialled in a number of schools in Aotearoa New Zealand as well as in Australia, England, and South Africa. Two teachers involved in the Project – Sally Tibbles and Mary Cornish – present a unit of work they designed using the Model for Year 7 students and reflect on the challenges and affordances of using the model as a design tool.

Dr Graham McPhail is a senior lecturer in the School of Curriculum and Pedagogy, in the Faculty of Education and Social Work, at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He took up this position in 2015 after twenty years of work in the secondary education sector. His research is centred on the role of knowledge in the curriculum, in particular within C21 schooling and music education contexts.

Dr Barbara Ormond is the Director of Secondary Programmes in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Auckland. She lectures in teacher education in the disciplines of history, art history, classical studies and social studies. Her research focusses on curriculum design, how teachers select knowledge for secondary history, and the impacts of standards-based assessment on knowledge. Barbara is involved in the current Review of the Achievement Standards for the NCEA as a member of the Subject Expert Group for Art History.