The problems facing Curriculum for Excellence have finally been identified. Carole Ford demonstrated them clearly in her recent article in the TESS.
If you know me your jaw may well now be on the floor. What? Fearghal agrees with Carole Ford’s piece!?! No, rest assured, I haven’t done a U-turn. No, I don’t agree with her points at all, but I think she unintentionally demonstrated why CfE is struggling to gain traction in so many parts of the country. Obviously there are many issues such as support, time, funding etc.; but perhaps the greatest barrier is the support for school leaders in understanding the change, which then impacts on their ability to lead the changes in their schools.
There are many points in her piece which I disagree with, but I’ll pick out a small sample to illustrate my point. In reference to literacy and numeracy she says:
pupils who fail to develop appropriate levels of literacy and numeracy skill in primary school rarely make good this deficit later in the educational process. The CfE solution to this is not, as one might expect, to focus attention on the primary years of schooling but to place responsibility for both onto secondary teachers. Thus we have physics teachers teaching literacy and French teachers teaching numeracy
I find this statement to be shockingly inaccurate for two reasons. Firstly, CfE is continuing to place a strong focus on literacy, numeracy (& health and well being) in the primary stages as well as secondary. And secondly, secondary teachers should not be ‘teaching literacy’ in place of their subject specialisms – but rather using their subject areas as contexts to develop these skills where appropriate. Throughout the broad general education the intention is to improve young people’s literacy and numeracy levels – this is not the sole domain of primary teachers, as any secondary teacher will tell you (bemoan)! Whilst there may well be a number of secondary schools around the country which are requiring their staff to be ‘teaching numeracy’ in place of their subject area, I would argue that this is not the fault of CfE, but of the school leaders who have misinterpreted the documentation.
She goes onto use a similar argument regarding interdisciplinary learning:
interdisciplinary learning, advocated by CfE, is a whole bone of contention in its own right. Why is taking a teacher out of his comfort zone a good thing? Do you wish to be treated by a doctor who is operating out of his comfort zone? The logic of interdisciplinary learning is that I will make better progress in German if the teacher is not fluent in German but pretty good at French or Spanish. In the language of Homer Simpson, “D’oh!”
It’s surprising that an article which criticises the lack of evidence presented to support CfE only itself contains a quote by Homer Simpson, but anyway, interdisciplinary learning. I personally don’t believe that interdisciplinary learning is the holy grail one might think it is if you listen to certain people, but I still think the quotation above misses the point. Interdisciplinary learning is not supposed to be about French teachers teaching German. It’s supposed to be about providing young people with opportunities to see their learning in a more joined up way and be beginning to make connections between the artificial barriers we’ve created between the subjects. This is a skill which I always say marks out the top candidates in Biology, and it is one which is becoming increasingly relevant in today’s world.
Once again, there may well be many teachers out there having to teach a subject outside their comfort zone under the banner of interdisciplinary learning and CfE, but I think Carole Ford is inadvertently highlighting an issue with her colleagues – not Curriculum for Excellence. Don’t get me wrong, I think there are many barriers facing the implementation of CfE, but not all of them lie with the policy documents or the national agencies – as demonstrated by this article.
FE college lecturers are also under pressure to teach all of these additional skills as well as their specialist subjects. I’m not sure I’m best placed to teach Citizenship or Health and Wellbeing -I’m not the best role model for either. My numeracy skills are okay, but my literacy probably isn’t up to scrutiny. I don’t know why managers (& politicians) expect us to be able to teach these things, and teach the units too without any extra time. I might actually do a bad job – perhaps my numeracy skills and methods are out of date. I certainly know that my kids use different methods for long division than I was taught at school. I might do more bad than good, and that’s bad, isn’t it?
Thanks Colin,
I think this is also a misinterpretation of the documentation. It shouldn’t be about “teaching” these skills – but capitalising on the opportunities which arise in your subject area to help young people to develop these skills in context. To a certain extent, we’ve often done this anyway, but CfE is raising the bar and asking us to be more cognisant of the development of these skills.
This may be challenging for many of us, but it’s intended to be beneficial for our learners not to be straightforward for us. I personally think it’s a good thing for kids to be deliberately developing and applying their literacy and numeracy skills across the curriculum and that we & they recognise the contribution subjects can make to their wider learning.
Fearghal
Definitely need to integrate and show relevance of literacy & numeracy across the curriculum. Kids often don’t see the relevance. Finding opportunities is sometimes difficult and ‘compartmentalisation’ of curriculum tends to work against teachers doing it.
I think the main problem with the implementation of cfe has been the way in which schools have jumped upon interdisciplinary activities as if that is all that requires changing. I agree that pupils should be involved in real life scenarios but remember, this has actually been happening for years in some subjects. My department for one has always strived to link learning with the world outside school. Cfe is not about changing everything but must be about adopting and sharing good practise, as well as trying to avoid pupils encountering the same work across different curricular areas.
Thanks Robert, totally agree!
I am so so glad that I read Carole Ford’s article due to your reference, if I had simply stumbled across the TES article I think I would have found myself leaving a comment which would have been undoubtedly less eloquent from the above post.
To put it simply – well said!
Superb response to a depressing and (wilfully?) ignorant analysis of CfE, Fearghal. My only comment in support of Ms Ford would be that CfE has suffered from very poor marketing to parents and teachers, which allows misrepresentation like hers to flourish.
All the best,
Gordon
The quote about inter disciplinary learning (or cross curricular learning as we call it down here) seems to miss the point in a quite spectacular way. Has anyone actually argued that “the logic of interdisciplinary learning is that I will make better progress in German if the teacher is not fluent in German but pretty good at French or Spanish”? This is clearly codswallop. The claim that’s made for this approach to learning is that it encourages to perceive links between different disciplines and to connect up their knowledge in a useful way. In the (poor) example cited the point of inter-disciplinary learning might be to see connections between French and German to better understand the features of each language.
Any fool can make fatuous interpretations for poorly chosen references. In English teaching we refer to this as D grade.