The recursive elaboration of key competencies as agents of curriculum change

The recursive elaboration of key competencies as agents of curriculum change

Rosemary Hipkins and Sally Boyd

Abstract

This paper views key competencies through a sociocultural lens to discuss the role they have played as agents of change in The New Zealand Curriculum and their as yet unrealised potential to stimulate further change. It draws on several exploratory studies to describe broad types of action and change which the key competencies have afforded, tracing several recursive cycles of professional learning during which understanding of the role key competencies might play in curriculum change became elaborated in deeper and more nuanced ways.

Introduction

This paper views key competencies through a sociocultural lens to discuss the role they have so far played as agents of change in The New Zealand Curriculum (NZC; Ministry of Education, 2007) and their as yet unrealised potential to stimulate further change. They are thus positioned as complex entities about whose curriculum potential there is much to learn. The idea of recursive elaboration is used to organise an account of the different ways in which schools have thus far interpreted the intent of the key competencies and used them to action curriculum changes, and related changes such as reporting to parents. The question addressed is: What types of action and change have the key competencies afforded? Evidence of the meaning schools have made of key competencies is largely drawn from the Curriculum Implementation Exploratory Studies (CIES). Evidence from other sources that aligns with the CIES findings is introduced where relevant.

The CIES study was funded by the Ministry of Education and traced the enactment of NZC in a number of “early adopter” schools over a 3-year time frame.¹ The exploratory nature of the CIES project came from the Ministry of Education’s desire to understand how NZC was being interpreted and enacted by schools seen to be leading the way. Revisiting each school a number of times over this 3-year period allowed us to build a complex picture of enacted change in each school as a learning system. The richly recursive nature of learning about the key competencies became more apparent as time went on (Hipkins, Cowie, Boyd, Keown, & McGee, 2011).

Interpretive framing

Positioning key competencies as active agents of change invokes a participatory ontology, common to theories of complex systems, in which learning is seen as an emergent property of interactions between the various parts of the system, and to sociocultural learning theories, where learning is similarly seen as dispersed across both people and objects. There are cues in NZC that point towards a sociocultural reading of key competencies, although it is fair to say that the signals are somewhat mixed and other aspects of their descriptions point to a more familiar cognitive and individualist framing. Concepts informed by sociocultural theory are evident in the following statements from NZC’s introduction to the key competencies:

The development of the competencies is both an end in itself (a goal) and the means by which other ends are achieved. Successful learners make use of the competencies in combination with all the other resources available to them. These include personal goals, other people, community knowledge and values, cultural tools (language, symbols and texts), and the knowledge and skills found in the different learning areas. (Ministry of Education, 2007, p. 12)

Opportunities to develop the key competencies occur in social contexts. People adopt and adapt practices that they see used and valued by those closest to them, and they make these practices part of their own identity and expertise. (Ministry of Education, 2007, p. 12)

The first of these excerpts is congruent with the sociocultural concept of affordances, which are the “action possibilities posed by objects or features in the environment” (Gee, 2008, p. 81). The second invokes the concept of situated cognition, which highlights the importance of locating learning in social contexts that meaningfully engage learners with the action possibilities on offer (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Both excerpts imply that learning opportunities are mediated by the various resources and cultural tools made available, including other people, and the routines and social practices present (Wertsch, 1991). Both point to learning being distributed across the various interacting elements of the learning system. Although these definitions were written to inform school professionals about a new dimension of the curriculum to be experienced by their students, complex systems theory directs attention to the learning that could be happening at all levels of the system. What is true for students as learners also holds for teachers as learners, for schools as systems in which organised professional learning occurs, and, indeed, for the education system as a whole.

The idea of recursive elaboration is also drawn from complex systems theory and points to the nonlinear and contingent nature of the pathways by which learning unfolds. Complex insights are unlikely to appear fully formed, and the recursive pathways by which they are reached are likely to include at least some avenues of exploration that ultimately prove to be unproductive, requiring some retracing and rethinking of earlier ideas and actions (Davis & Sumara, 2006). What a system “learns” gains in nuances and richness of connections (i.e., becomes more elaborated) as new knowledge emerges in action. There can be elements of simultaneity about this learning, because it is likely to advance on a number of fronts, amplifying when they serendipitously come together (Davis & Sumara, 2010).

Challenges for interpreting NZC

As a framework curriculum, NZC provides scope for considerable variation in uptake and implementation between different schools. With the whole of the nationally mandated curriculum now outlined in one slim book, each school has to work out how to build up a more detailed local curriculum based on the framework NZC presents. Broadly, schools are expected to give life to NZC’s 21st century vision by designing learning programmes that weave the values and key competencies through the content/concepts specified in the learning areas, and to use the eight specified principles as a check that their local decisions align with the national intent. The ideal is that such curriculum planning will result in the provision of learning experiences that support all students to develop and strengthen their current competencies and to explore and model the curriculum values, all in the context of learning the concepts and skills specified in the achievement objectives. Integrating all these elements is a highly complex design task, and there are potentially very many different ways to assemble the pieces, as the various interpretations and iterations discussed in this paper will illustrate.

In theory, if all the parts of this complex curriculum framework come together harmoniously, the whole should be more than the sum of the parts. In a learning system, knowledge emerges in action and transcends the limitations of the individual system components (Capra, 2002; Davis & Sumara, 2010). If that ideal could be achieved, every New Zealand student would experience learning opportunities at an appropriate level of challenge. They would be making good progress towards robust yet personally meaningful learning goals. All the teachers would also be learning and growing as they reflected individually and collaboratively during ongoing cycles of curriculum design and review.

This vision is obviously just an ideal. Evidence from diverse sources² indicates that the professional freedom afforded to schools, and the individuals within them, can be very challenging, especially for those accustomed to thinking of a national curriculum as a prescription for the content that should be covered (for a synthesis of this diverse evidence base, see Schagen, 2011). A framework curriculum enables new ways of working, but can paradoxically also support current practice when new possibilities remain unrecognised or unexplored, or in some cases are denied in the name of maintaining strongly established traditions. The structure of NZC as a document of two halves does little to ameliorate this challenge. The key competencies are an obvious new feature of the more visionary and aspirational front half of NZC. With the partial exception of the Science learning area, there is no guidance provided within the document on how to integrate them with the learning area content that composes the back and more traditional half of NZC.³ The full import of the integration challenge will be addressed in the final section of this paper.

Notwithstanding these challenges, early adopter schools embraced the opportunity to work out how best to educate their students for a new century and how to make all the parts fit together into a coherent, vibrant whole. What makes the difference? Laying out the scope of every challenge that confronts schools as they endeavour to design a local curriculum is beyond the scope of one short paper. Thus the focus here is limited to the role that key competencies might play as one affordance for curriculum change. The limitations of written text demand a linear sequencing of the learning that has taken place so far. There is an element of moving forward in the overall implementation narrative. But the various events described also overlapped and looped back on themselves in a recursive process of complex professional learning.

Relating key competencies to current understanding of good practice

The concept of affordances directs attention to the manner in which any new opportunity is perceived by learners. Some may see rich opportunities to learn, where others, for various reasons, see incomprehensible or irrelevant ideas or actions (Gee, 2008). From this sociocultural perspective it is important to trace teachers’ and schools’ espoused understanding of key competencies, and also the nature of any changes they might have made as a result of these encounters. The curriculum developers⁴ did their best to ensure that New Zealand’s teachers would find the idea of key competencies accessible and relevant (Rutherford, 2005). The five NZC key competencies were adapted from those articulated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in the process being given plain-language titles that minimised the use of jargon. The contrast between the originals and the NZC versions can be seen in Table 1. It will be evident from this juxtaposition of titles, even without reading the expanded definitions and discussion in the original OECD documents (see, in particular, Rychen & Salganik, 2003), that some of the intended richness of the key competencies could easily be lost in translation. For example, managing self is a subset of acting autonomously in the OECD version.

Table 1 The origins of the five NZC key competencies

* These are “best matches” not 1:1 equivalents.

Early adopter schools began their exploration of the key competencies during 2006 while NZC was still in draft form (Cowie et al., 2009). The leaders of these schools perceived that the key competencies were the most obviously different element in NZC, something that had not been a part of the 1990s curriculum documents. One cluster of Normal Schools collaborated to explore the key competencies together and invited researchers to document the process as they first tried to weave them into the curriculum of each school (Boyd & Watson, 2006).

Taking their cue from NZC itself, these and other early adopter schools initially made sense of the key competencies by developing their own plain-language definitions for the five individual competencies, linking these to things the school already valued. They were quick to recognise the importance of developing a shared language for talking about the key competencies so that students did not experience discontinuities in the way they were manifested in different classrooms. The definitions in NZC were both a help and a potential liability for this process. On the plus side they made the idea of competencies accessible and inviting for both teachers and students, and student-friendly versions soon began to appear in classrooms (Boyd & Watson, 2006; Cowie et al., 2009). On the minus side the plain-language titles and definitions conveyed a deceptive simplicity that did initially mask some of the deeper intent of the OECD initiative.

One aspect of these early learning challenges was the need to work out how key competencies differed in principle from the essential skills of the 1990s curriculum documents. Many people initially saw them as a replacement for these skills, in effect a new and improved version of something that was already familiar (Reid, 2006). Again, this was both helpful and unhelpful. It was helpful when schools used this interpretation to improve their processes for teaching students new skills. It was unhelpful if schools stopped exploring key competencies at this point and did not come back to them. Overall, at this early stage many teachers saw no need to make more than superficial changes to actual teaching and learning. Evaluative evidence from a wider range of schools and data sources provides indications that many teachers may still be at this stage of elaboration; that is, they value the key competencies but have yet to make substantive changes in practice as a response (see, for example, Hipkins, 2010; Sinnema, 2011).

Treating the key competencies as if they were personality traits was another unhelpful early interpretation. It arose as an unintended consequence when teachers explored the key competencies by collectively developing a generic rubric for each and then adding these rubrics to the documents they used for reporting to parents. A child could be at “level 2” for thinking (say), as if this were an invariant characteristic of their learning behaviour (Hipkins, 2009). Some rubrics drew on semantics to differentiate their levels (e.g., often, sometimes, seldom, never). This type of reporting immediately caused challenges, especially in secondary schools, where students have different teachers for different subjects. For example, a student who displays strong thinking competencies in one context might struggle to do so in a subject where they are less confident of their ability. Furthermore, different aspects of the competency are called into action by different task demands, including dispositional aspects as well as the relevant skills:

thinking dispositions do not affect the whole of thinking. A person may be disposed to deep thinking in his scientific occupation but to superficial thinking in the political realm. Thinking dispositions are context dependent. (Harpaz, 2007, p. 1851)

Many of the early adopter schools did initially go some way down the path of developing more generic rubrics, but they soon recognised the difficulties they had created and abandoned this early exploratory work. At the completion of the CIES project, one unresolved question was whether other schools might learn from this cautionary tale, or whether making this type of recursive progress is actually a necessary step to deepening insights into the complex nature of key competencies. Interestingly, many teachers in the CIES schools held the view that their initial steps had been both necessary and valuable. They had no regrets about the recursion that had occurred, seeing it as valuable for developing a shared view of key competencies across the school, a useful introduction to their complexities and the source of emergent insights into the need for different approaches to assessment and reporting (Hipkins et al., 2011).

Weaving key competencies into innovative school practice

Even before NZC had been finalised, some schools had developed visual metaphors that represented their vision and values to their local community. Typically, the image developed made connections to aspects of the local environment (perhaps a local feature or a unique landmark), and the various elements that made up the image each carried some symbolic meaning related to the school’s work. This appeared to be partly a marketing strategy that gave the school an obvious point of difference from others in the local community. The visually memorable format also provided new opportunities to “think with” the metaphor when revisiting the school’s existing charter documents and to share this thinking in an accessible way with parents and the wider community, and indeed with the students themselves. Even before NZC was released, students in some CIES schools had been actively involved in these visioning exercises and were accustomed to discussing their learning in more transparent, if somewhat generic, terms (Cowie et al., 2009). As one primary school principal noted, they were “ready and waiting” for NZC.

When NZC was released, many more schools adopted the example set by these trailblazers, but with a new twist. Now the quest for a unique visual metaphor could be used as a focus for initial explorations of the vision, values, principles and key competencies of NZC, and as a means of weaving them into a coherent memorable whole that would communicate these ideas to their local community in a form that could be easily understood. When displayed in classrooms they act as touchstones for setting a supportive learning environment, and serve as a reminder of all of the learning goals valued in the school (Hipkins et al., 2011).

In the early adopter schools this visioning process provided opportunities for recursive elaboration of earlier, definition-focused interpretations of the key competencies. Leaders in these schools recognised that living up to their aspirational metaphors required that the key competencies act as agents of change in practice. Creating alignments between earlier professional learning and ongoing explorations of the key competencies proved to be a helpful strategy for engaging teachers in thinking about new possibilities, and for preventing them from feeling overwhelmed by yet more change (Cowie et al., 2009). Strategic connections were made to changes initiated by earlier participation in professional learning related to: integrating information technologies into learning, most typically the idea of making greater use of inquiry learning pedagogies; promoting assessment for learning, and in particular its reflective and metacognitive dimensions; or strengthening literacy practices across the curriculum. In consequence, schools considered how the key competencies might transform existing practices in some or all of these areas. New connections were forged between the key competencies, the “Effective pedagogy” section of NZC, and learning to learn, one of NZC’s principles (Hipkins et al., 2011).

For some teachers, consideration of ways to make explicit and strengthen students’ competencies now imbued their pedagogy and their own learning with powerful new meanings and a redirected sense of purpose. However, making pedagogical changes need not imply that the intended content/conceptual learning focus change. For example, when teachers introduce assessment for learning strategies, students may become more involved in monitoring their own progress, but the targets of that progress may remain as they were. Similarly, implementing inquiry learning pedagogies need not imply that the subject-specific objectives change; only that they might be achieved in a more engaging manner. These changes position key competencies as agents of curriculum improvement, but not necessarily as potentially transforming the curriculum that students experience.

With the fostering of students’ key competencies in mind, early adopter schools also began to make innovative changes in extracurricular practice, again often aligned with other changes in their work. Building on their early positive experiences of working with student leaders on curriculum visioning exercises, one cluster of CIES schools next saw the potential to align key competency development with the adoption of restorative justice approaches to discipline. A review of current behaviour management processes revealed a lack of alignment with the growing understanding that key competencies need to be fostered in all aspects of school practice. Behaviour was being managed by the adults in these schools in somewhat punitive ways that did not enable students to develop and learn. The consequence of these deliberations was that students and staff learned processes for managing difficult social interactions in skilful and healthy ways. The success of these experiences then triggered the next recursive cycle of review of other aspects of school practice in relation to key competency development (Hipkins et al., 2011).

Overall, the early adopter schools made rapid progress in empowering students to extend and strengthen their key competencies in many areas that wrap around traditional curriculum content. However, using the key competencies as a lever for transforming the actual “content” of the curriculum appears to entail shifts in practice that are more difficult to achieve.

Weaving key competencies with curriculum content

School leaders were aware they would need to show how they had integrated, or at least aligned, key competencies with the achievement objectives specified in the back half of NZC. One typical early response from teachers was to look at existing curriculum documentation to see where the names of key competencies might replace existing references to essential skills. Curriculum theorist Alan Reid calls this “name and hope” planning (Reid, 2006). Like the generic rubrics developed during early explorations, name and hope planning gives no explicit indication of how learning experiences will actually change.

The manner in which teachers can envisage planning for and enacting key competencies within a learning area is likely to be mediated by existing approaches to their implementation within the wider school system. If they are satisfied with generic rubrics, teachers might not see the limitations of a superficial alignment of key competencies with their existing curriculum plans. On the other hand the process of reviewing a learning area and making changes to accommodate competency development could result in critique of previously developed school-wide approaches to the key competencies, such as more generic descriptors they might have initially developed. This is one example of the potential for iterative cycles of professional learning to stimulate and sustain ongoing curriculum change. However, it is by no means inevitable that schools will take this step.

Early adopter schools did typically engage in another cycle of recursive learning when they reached this point on their NZC implementation journey. Most addressed the integration challenge by beginning with the one-page “essence statement” for a learning area when exploring ways to integrate the key competencies with its specified content. This page came to be seen as providing a lens for the identification of opportunities to “frame” aspects of competency development in ways that are subject-specific. Over the 3 years of the CIES study these schools explored and discarded a number of planning formats. By the end of the study most were still not satisfied that they had resolved their questions about how to fully integrate key competencies into subject learning, so this iteration of their learning is very much a work in progress.

Viewed through the lens of affordances, this type of integration can be seen as fraught with translation challenges. Achieving a dynamic and purposeful integration of key competencies with traditional curriculum content may be easier said than done. At the conclusion of the 3 years of the CIES study we identified what we called a “knowing/doing gap” between schools’ recognition that there was much still to learn about subject-specific change and their ability to envision and enact such change (Cowie, Hipkins, Keown, & Boyd, 2011).

Illustrating the potential to make small yet powerful changes in the curriculum that students experience, a recent collaboration between teachers and researchers explored the integration of key competencies with primary school reading programmes. A small number of experienced teachers were supported by the researchers to explore different ways of “being a reading teacher” and to investigate any changes the key competencies might be expected to make to how they carried out that role. As they implemented their identified changes, the teachers found they were able to share more of their personal passion for reading with their children. Rich conversations about multiple possible meanings for texts helped the children make diverse connections from the reading programme to their daily lives. Some previously reluctant readers became much more engaged with the whole process of learning to read as a result. However, to support these rich classroom conversations, the teachers found they needed to learn more about text conventions; i.e., to update their academic knowledge of English (Twist & McDowall, 2010). In this example, successfully transcending the knowing/doing gap required the academic knowledge of the researchers and the situated practice knowledge of the teachers. It also required considerable time for reflection, envisioning, rethinking and changing, and the whole project took 2 years to unfold.

One lesson from this example is that teachers need a strong knowledge of the nature of their subject as a knowledge-building discipline, especially if they are going to shift their pedagogical focus from ready-made products of learning to more participatory acts of meaning making. Potentially, every new episode of learning brings multiple possibilities for competency development, and these will play out differently for each student, depending on the knowledge, skills, learning and action dispositions they bring to the moment as their personal affordances for learning. The salient questions for teachers to ask here are likely to be more familiar in the curriculum tradition of European schools,⁵ where teachers are more likely to explore and clarify how the content they teach contributes to the overall character development of the young learner. One science education researcher has characterised the differences between the European and Anglophone curriculum traditions thus:

In the one [European] the maturing young person is the purpose of the curriculum. In the other [Anglophone] the teaching of subjects is the purpose. In the one, disciplines of knowledge are to be mined to achieve its purpose; in the other, disciplines of knowledge are the purposes. (Fensham, 2004, p. 150)

The writers of the NZC essence statements were charged with outlining the unique contribution that each learning area makes to the overall curriculum. While an examination of this thinking will not necessarily translate into deeper debate about the purposes of learning a specific subject and how the specified content might contribute to the strategic development of related learning goals, it is certainly a good place to begin the next cycle of recursive elaboration.

Key competencies and ongoing change

This paper has described a type of recursive journeying that has allowed schools to enrich their understanding of key competencies over time as they learn to make multiple and increasingly nuanced connections between the idea of educating for competency development and other aspects of their professional work. By the conclusion of the CIES project, leaders of these early adopter schools clearly understood that it would not have been possible to get the implementation process “right first time”. As the need for greater recursion became apparent, the importance these schools already attached to supportive professional learning processes was further underscored. Engaging yet challenging opportunities for collaborative professional learning are an important affordance for continuing to deepen insights about the key competencies.

The metaphor of an iceberg can usefully be invoked to describe the overall professional learning journey experienced in these schools. The 10 percent of the iceberg above the water represents familiar skills-based individual aspects of competency development. It is important for schools and teachers to make these early visible links between key competencies and the best of current practice. Such links open up a space for possibilities and may lead to improvements in traditional teaching and learning.

Continuing with the iceberg metaphor, immediately below the surface, schools might discover the difference key competencies can make to pedagogy, and this is one possible avenue towards a more participatory view of learning. Teachers and students work together to bring a shared language for competency development into life, and to link this with other aspects of the school’s vision and values. School leaders might make more deliberate connections between key competency development and school-wide and co-curricular practices, providing enhanced opportunities for student participation. Teachers might now be more deliberate about making connections with things in the students’ lives outside school and including inquiries about real things/issues in their classroom programmes. The concept of learning to learn is also likely to come into focus, and this adds a reflective metacognitive dimension to the students’ learning.

At the deeper layers, well hidden in the Anglophone curriculum tradition, key competencies have transformative potential that is not yet widely recognised or exemplified. Yet it is this potential that could help bridge the front-half/back-half divide of the NZC framework by reframing conversations about learning: at the school-wide level, with parents and the wider community, and inside the classroom. The challenge is to enact the front-end vision in ways that make a demonstrable difference in all of the school’s practices. This is the point at which schools and teachers (and parents) must confront their views of purposes for learning, allowing the various parts of NZC to come together as a more coherent whole. The CIES research has shown it can take schools a number of years, and a number of critical cycles of recursive elaboration, before these deeper layers of key competencies come into view. It is entirely possible that there are even deeper layers not yet encountered in the NZC implementation journey.

Time and space are needed to rethink deep assumptions about the nature and purposes of learning and about where, when and how it might occur. Learning about the nature of their discipline areas is likely to be new for many teachers, and they need good exemplar materials to show them how a focus on knowledge building might change the ways they introduce and develop traditional “content”. One short paper can only point towards the potential for key competencies to contribute to this type of change.

References

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The authors

Rosemary Hipkins is a chief researcher at the New Zealand Council for Educational Research.

Email: rose.hipkins@nzcer.org.nz

Sally Boyd is a senior researcher at the New Zealand Council for Educational Research.

Email: sally.boyd@nzcer.org.nz

Notes

1Details of CIES can be found in the final report (Hipkins et al., 2011). Nine schools were traced across the whole 3 years, but many others contributed at different stages. There were 20 case study schools in the first round of the research. Halving this for the second round allowed us to widen the scope to include a range of principals and curriculum leaders in four “mediated conversation” workshops, each a day’s duration. In addition, some examples in this paper are drawn from other early adopter schools who participated as presenters in the New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER) Curriculum Conference series in 2009 (Hipkins, Cowie, & Boyd, 2009).

2The Ministry of Education has invested in two large projects to understand the implementation of NZC. Complementing CIES, jointly led by NZCER and the University of Waikato, the Monitoring and Evaluating Curriculum Implementation study was a quantitative evaluation led by The University of Auckland. The Education Review Office (ERO) has reported several times on aspects of implementation. NZCER’s latest iterations of their national surveys of both secondary and primary schools have included sections on NZC and its uptake. For all relevant ministry-funded projects, see http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/Curriculum-resources/Curriculum-research-...

3The writers of the Science learning area did endeavour to build the key competencies into the Nature of Science integrating strand (for a preliminary discussion, see Barker, Hipkins and Bartholomew, 2004). However, this Nature of Science strand itself requires integration with content, so this could only ever be a partial means of addressing the question of the difference key competencies might make to the learning that students experience.

4The Ministry of Education took the lead in a process of “co-construction” of the NZC framework, but the process involved many school leaders and education thinkers in day-long working meetings, with specific design tasks delegated to smaller groups between times. Note that the content of the learning area parts of NZC was developed at the same time, but by teams of teachers with expertise in the various learning areas. Very few participants belonged to both groups, and this doubtless contributed to the lack of integration of the two halves of the framework.

5This is called the didaktic tradition, but the word has a very different meaning from the English didactic. For an expanded discussion, see Fensham (2004), Chapter 10, “Focus on content”.