How to improve curriculum planning in schools

For teachers, deciding what to teach and how to teach it can be a big part of their job. Great teaching inside the classroom relies on great planning and preparation outside of the classroom and this takes time. But how do teachers find the time for this kind of curriculum and lesson planning?

For our latest report, Ending the lesson lottery: How to improve curriculum planning in schools, our staff surveyed more than 2,000 Australian teachers and school leaders, about curriculum planning practices in their schools and what help they need.

Listen to host Kat Clay in conversation with Senior Associate Amy Haywood, and Associate Nick Parkinson, on how to improve curriculum planning in Australian schools.

Transcript

Kat Clay: For teachers, deciding what to teach and how to teach it can be a big part of their job. Great teaching inside the classroom relies on great planning and preparation outside of the classroom, and this takes time. But how do teachers find the time for this kind of curriculum and lesson planning? For our latest report, Ending the Lesson Lottery, How to Improve Curriculum Planning in Schools, our staff surveyed more than 2, 000 Australian teachers and school leaders about curriculum planning practices in their schools and what help they need.

I’m Kat Clay and here to dig into what these dramatic results mean for education in Australia are two of the authors of the report. Senior associate and former teacher Amy Haywood and associate and student teacher Nick Parkinson. Welcome to both of you.

Amy Haywood: Thank you. Great to be here.

Nick Parkinson: Thanks Kat.

Kat Clay: So, Amy, I mean, I want to start with you. I mean, don’t teachers just teach the Australian curriculum? I mean, what do teachers do when they’re curriculum planning?

Amy Haywood: That is a great question because a lot of people think. You know, we’ve got the Australian curriculum, which is this national curriculum that teachers need to teach to, or in some states like Victoria, New South Wales, they have the Victorian curriculum or the New South Wales syllabus.

But these documents do set out like a broad direction that teachers need to follow, but they don’t get down to that level of detail. There’s still a lot of heavy lifting and quite a vast gap between those documents and bringing it to life in the classroom. So, if I was going to give you an example, I could talk a little bit about year seven history.

I’m actually a trained English and history teacher. So, this one speaks close to my heart. If I was a year seven history teacher, I’d be teaching about an ancient civilization. Now the Australian curriculum gives you five that you can choose from. You need to teach about the organization and roles of key groups in ancient society.

such as the nobility, bureaucracy, women, and slaves. That leaves a lot on the table. Even if you’ve decided, okay, I’m going to teach about ancient Egypt, it’s like, which groups am I going to teach about? In what depth? and what, how am I going to assess this kind of learning? What am I going to do in a sequence of lessons across, you know, a whole unit of study?

And it really does assume that teachers already know a lot about ancient Egypt. Which is, you know, a vast period of time, and they may not necessarily have studied that a lot. So, we’re leaving a lot on the table for teachers to do themselves. So, our report is really bringing to light the fact that yes, we’ve got these mandated documents.

We’re not recommending that we should change them. We’re glad to see that they’ve been ticked off and they’re ready to go. And they give this guidance to teachers, but we just think between them and what happens in the class, teachers need a lot more of that implementation support. And we’ve thought and gone into, okay.

Trying to understand what that process looks like. And from those broad guidelines, we’ve estimated out, it takes about 500 hours for a teacher to go through and plan out that lesson by lesson, really, really detailed, highly sequenced curriculum materials that they might need for a classroom. But a teacher has, you know, more than one.

Class in a year. So, if that takes 500 hours to do a year at English, but they have four different subjects, which the typical secondary teacher would have, that’s 2000 hours, which is their entire working hours for an entire year. So, we really feel like there’s a lot left on the table if we’re asking teachers to do this work from scratch.

So, there’s a lot more that we can do to support teachers with that particular work.

Kat Clay: So, Nick, I mean, in the report, you described this problem as a lesson lottery. What do you mean by that?

Nick Parkinson: The term lesson lottery is one that a teacher in one of the schools that we profiled for our case studies came up with.

And it’s a term that resonated a lot with me as someone who’s soon to be a graduate teacher. It’s really the luck of the draw whether or not I will end up in a school which has a bank of really great curriculum materials that I can adapt for my class. Or if I’ll be scouring the internet and developing things from scratch.

But this lottery is a lottery that plays out as much for students as it does for teachers. And we heard that time and time again, throughout our research. What we mean by lesson lottery is that too often what can happen given the broadness of the curriculum that Amy just described is that teachers choose to teach different parts.

They might choose to teach them in different ways as well, so that the approach that is used in one classroom might contradict that used in the classroom down the hall. An example of this that we heard was a primary school that had mapped out its whole curriculum, began this process that we’re talking about in the report, and found that it teaches the book Tiddalick in every year level.

So, there can be this unnecessary Duplication, but there can also be important critical gaps that students miss out on. And this makes life really hard for teachers too. It’s not always clear what students have done in the previous year and what gaps might exist. So, all this together is what we call the lesson lottery.

And what it means is that even the hardest working teacher, while they can give their students something really high quality, they can’t ensure that it’s sequenced. So that what students learn in one year builds on what they learned before and bridges to what they’ll learn in the future.

Kat Clay: This is bringing back memories for me of reading, playing BD Bo multiple times at, I believe, primary school and then in high school.

You guys surveyed more than 2, 000 teachers and school leaders here, so that’s quite a few. What did you learn about how teachers are currently planning in schools?

Nick Parkinson: Yeah, look Kat, so I think your example from primary school is not an isolated incident. I went through the same thing, I’m sure that, that others also had those experiences in school, and certainly that’s what our survey points to.

Okay. So, this survey, which is the first public survey of its kind from our understanding, asked teachers how they planned for their lessons and the materials they used in class. It provides a unique and quite worrying window into curriculum planning in schools. So, when we talk of a lesson lottery, we can see how this plays out for most teachers.

We found that only 15 percent of teachers have access to this comprehensive bank of high-quality curriculum materials that they can pick up, adapt, and use in class. But this is worse in disadvantaged schools where teachers are only half as likely to report having access to such materials as teachers in advantaged schools.

So, without shared resources at hand, what we found in our survey was that most teachers end up planning alone, almost half of them said that they were the person who’s mainly responsible for doing all this kind of work for their subject. But in small schools, that’s those with 200 students or fewer, this rose to 71 percent of teachers.

So that’s almost three quarters of teachers who are doing the bulk of the work planning for their subjects and sheltering that burden alone. Now you might think Kat that as you’ve been in teaching for longer, well, surely there’s, you know, some efficiencies over time. You get better at planning. Well, that’s not what our survey found.

In fact, experienced teachers spent just as long planning and have just as much work as beginning teachers. Part of this is actually because as curriculums change and given just how many subjects there are, many experienced teachers. end up being allocated subjects they’ve not taught before. Our survey found that half of secondary teachers with three years or more experience are taking a subject for the first time this year.

These teachers may lack a back catalogue of materials to draw upon when planning, just like out of field and beginning teachers like myself. What this creates is a huge, huge challenge. And it’s one that exacerbates workloads, which if you’ve been following the news, you know, are a pressing problem for teachers and have been for some time.

Kat Clay: So, I mean, this is also bringing back memories because I am a qualified TESOL teacher, and I work teaching English as a second language. And I mean, the amount of times that I had to go to the internet to find a resource, just before class because I didn’t have time, and I was trying to find something that would help the students understand the lesson.

And I can’t imagine for teachers in a school who are already time poor and then have additional pressures on their time like, you know, supervision and playgrounds and all of those extra things that we’ve done in our previous report on teacher time. Just how hectic that could be to actually have to develop the curriculum effectively.

We’re expecting teachers here to be pretty much superhuman. What was really interesting about this report is that you’ve actually visited a lot of schools in your research for this report. So, you’ve profiled five exemplary case study schools in your report. What I’d really like to know is what are these schools doing differently to other schools?

Amy Haywood: We were really, really lucky to be able to go on site and visit. Five schools across Australia. So, we had, one school in Southwest Sydney, Marsden Road Public School, two schools over in WA, Serpentine Primary and Averley Secondary, and then two schools in Victoria, Docklands Primary and Clarendon, College in Ballarat.

And what we saw that was really key was that these schools had decided to take on this whole school approach to curriculum planning. And what fundamentally underpinned that was this collective agreement about, okay, here’s what we’ve decided specifically students are going to learn and the skills that they’re going to develop, not just in my class, but in all of the years of learning that we’ve got in our school.

So, they’d really deliberately decided. Here’s what we’re gonna learn in prep through 123 all the way to grade six. If it was a primary school and seven to the final years, if it was a high school, and you could tell when you walk down the hall that that collective agreement meant that students were actually learning the same core content.

So, you could look down and look into classrooms and say, okay, well, this year six mass class is actually going through the same set of slides as this other year six mass class. They’re going to do it slightly differently. Obviously, each teacher, you know, their personality shines through, but they’ll be making small adjustments based on, you know, my class might go through it slower because they need a little bit more time, or another class might go through it quicker and do more of the extension activities.

So, there’s still, you know, but they, they’re all getting the same core kind of content across those years. The benefits that we saw were huge, though it wasn’t necessarily easy to put into practice. It takes a lot of time, but those benefits made it worth it. So, for teachers, it actually reduced their workload quite a bit, because it meant that, you know, they, they didn’t have to plan everything.

They didn’t have to scour the internet. Like you said, On their own, they could actually share the planning and it meant that the planning that they did to say, if I was just planning 1 unit in a term, I could go into a lot of depth and I could really focus on, you know, exactly getting that particular unit of work and all the lesson materials.

Just right and ready to go for all of the teachers that were also teaching that subject. We had one teacher tell us, you know, they came to the school and their planning load just dropped by two thirds. They said it was absolutely enormous. And this was quite revolutionary. It also meant that the time that they were planning for class actually shifted in terms of what they were doing rather than scrambling for what am I going to do in class tomorrow?

They were actually thinking, I already have this book. I know I’m going to be reading this book with my students. What? How am I going to actually make sure all of the students in my class are able to engage with that text? Which questions are we going to ask? Where am I going to get students to turn or talk?

Is this a whole class discussion and be able to think about what students will need, what some of the students will need for extension and where students might need a bit further support. And these kinds of materials are really, really helpful, particularly for those beginning teachers, out of field teachers, or even just, you know, busy teachers who’ve had.

Something happened. There’s a lesson. They’re ready to go that they already understand and know how to use in terms of students. There’s huge benefits as well because it reduces those gaps. We already know, and the teachers have come to this collective agreement about what’s going to be learned in prep year 1 year 2.

It means that there’s consistency and we’re building this foundational knowledge over time. And that’s particularly important for disadvantaged students who might not get access to that kind of school knowledge, that kind of support. You know, knowledge base that comes through schooling. The other thing is it creates this sense of consistency for students.

They just know. Here are the expectations of this school. Here’s what I should be learning in this class. And it, it, it runs right through all of the classes in their school. So, there’s a huge amount of benefit. We were really glad to be able to go in and visit those schools and see what a whole school approach looks like in practice.

And I’d really encourage you to take a look at the report and see.

Kat Clay: And we will have a further report I think next year on how schools can actually implement a whole school curriculum. So, I mean, the big question is, in your survey, did you find any differences between the schools that had school wide planning and those who didn’t?

Nick Parkinson: The way we set up the survey allowed us to compare responses between people who had this whole school approach that we’ve been talking about and those who didn’t. And really what we found is the proof is absolutely in the pudding. Our survey shows that teachers and students benefit immensely from such an approach.

So, compared to schools where this bank doesn’t exist. Teachers at schools with a bank were twice as likely to agree that students consistently learn the same thing, no matter who they’re taught by. So, these schools are really doing a good job at tackling this lesson lottery that we discussed at the start of this podcast.

The other thing is that these teachers said they’re more likely to have a shared professional understanding of what effective teaching is. They’re also reaping the benefits in terms of workloads. So, they were nearly four times as likely to say that they felt satisfied with curriculum planning. And it’s not hard to see why they spent about three hours less per week.

On the planning and when we’ve scaled across the profession, that’s about 20 million hours a year, which in the scheme of what governments and unions negotiate over for enterprise bargaining agreements, that’s just a mammoth amount of time. But these benefits I’ve just talked about, these aren’t shared equally.

Disadvantaged and small schools are less likely to adopt this approach, and they face real headwinds to doing so. They have more beginning teachers, higher teacher turnover, and higher rates of teachers who are out of field. And that’s not to mention the other headwinds they face, such as challenging student behaviours and scarce resources that need to be stretched thin across the school.

What we find is that teachers in these schools and teachers elsewhere are really eager for change. 9 in 10 teachers we surveyed said that having access to a comprehensive bank of high-quality curriculum materials would give them more time to focus on their teaching and meet the individual needs of students in their classes.

Kat Clay: What was really encouraging to see is that some of the schools in the report had been able to really target, solutions for children that were struggling in school because of this. Curriculum bank. So, they were able to see who wasn’t keeping up at a year level year on year and actually focus the support.

And I mean, it was really encouraging to see particular students who’d gone into year seven, not being able to spell and then coming up the other end with massively improved results. I mean, turning to you, I mean, if teachers. want this, right? Why aren’t more schools actually undertaking a whole school approach to curriculum planning?

Amy Haywood: It is really tricky to do. it’s really hard to do this work in schools because you really need to think about and rethink how we’re running schools in terms of that student journey from grade prep right through to the end of the schooling and really use the curriculum as that kind of organizing model for a school.

It’s not easy to do, and it takes a lot of work in schools, and for us, I mean, at the end of the day, the thing that is important and makes a difference is what teachers are doing and how they’re teaching students in their classroom. It’s really complicated work what teachers are doing in those instructional minutes.

And so, we’re going to be talking about how can governments really matter? So, there’s only so many things like a government can do. A lot of this curriculum planning work will need to happen in schools. So, we’re really trying to think about, okay, how can governments better support and help teachers and school leaders on the ground?

So, we’ve come through with a number of recommendations. There are four in the report. The first one, which might seem like a no brainer, if you think about our surveys, is really around providing teachers and all teachers with access to these. high quality, comprehensive curriculum materials that they can choose to use and adapt for their school setting.

So, in terms of those materials, when we say comprehensive, we’re really thinking about, you know, highly sequenced materials that go over, you know, a year or years of learning, and they do go down to that kind of lesson level detail. Teachers can choose how much of that detail they want to use, but there is this kind of worked example or model that they can see Here’s how this would work within a lesson context.

And that’s really useful for those beginning teachers, those out of field teachers, teachers who might be teaching a subject for the 1st time. We’ve got some examples in the report of what those could potentially look like. We think that that, you know, making sure that those materials are available for schools to then adapt and use as they wish and as suits for that context is a really great first step.

We don’t necessarily think it’s a silver bullet. we also think that there needs to be this large investment and a major boost in thinking about professional development for not only teachers, but also principals and those curriculum leaders. We saw across the case study schools; this whole school approach didn’t happen without really strong leadership.

And so, we do need a lot of professional development and support for principals to actually lead that works and think about, okay, how is this going to roll out in my school? And then those at those curriculum, leadership level, which is really those heads of faculty. They need to be able to be given the authority time and the expertise to actually go.

Okay, here’s what learning is going to look like in my particular subject. If it’s a. secondary science across, you know, year seven, all the way through to year 12. And then also for teachers, there’s a, there’s a lot of work. We can’t just give teachers a material and think that our job is done. There’s a lot of work needed for them to be able to understand, adapt it, and then come to that collective agreement in their school.

Beyond just thinking about the materials and that professional development, we’ve also thought a bit about school reviews, and we think that there’s some work to do there in terms of how we go in and, review schools and think about the work they’re doing. We think curriculums, you know, the vital thing that schools are being charged with doing is teaching our students the curriculum.

So, it should be a major factor in how we actually review schools. And we’re not talking about those minimum standards, you know, compliance reviews. We think every school should undergo; you know. And an improvement focused review where they actually look quite closely at their curriculum and not just, you know, a tick and flick.

Oh, yes, you’ve got a curriculum. It’s documented somewhere actually looking at it and going, does this make sense? How this has been sequenced? You know, are you teaching six times across your primary school and then being able to look in and see how does that flow through into the classroom? And does it make sense?

Principals should be able to then get, you know, some really clear feedback on what that curriculum is looking like and that it should be aligned with the support that they need to help them improve that curriculum and the enactment in the classroom. The very final thing that we’re, we’re recommending is a, an uplift in the amount of spending that we’ve got on research in the area.

We just think that there’s a lot that we don’t necessarily know, and other countries have put a lot more investment into this area. So, we’d be recommending some rigorous evaluation that can means that we can learn the lessons from any investment and take them forward into the future. Thank you so

Kat Clay: much, Amy and Nick.

It’s always great to have team education on the podcast. I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s chat about the education report. If you’d like to read it, it is available for free. free online at grattan.edu.au. If you’d like to talk to us further about this report, we’re on social media on Twitter at Grattaninst and all other social media channels at Grattan Institute.

As always, please do take care and thanks so much for listening.