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Opportunity knocks?
By Anne Moore, Primary school headteacher
Many within the teaching profession have strong views on how to take advantage of the opportunities CfE presents, and how to cope with its challenges. Here, just a few of them share their thoughts and experiences.
For me, CfE is the most exciting thing to happen in Scottish education during my teaching career. Schools and teachers now have the chance to take back some of the freedoms which were denied in the previous curricular model and, like any change, this brings opportunities as well as challenges. Handing schools more autonomy in curricular design is both stimulating and testing. However important curriculum reform may be, the focus of CfE is most definitely rooted within the learning experiences of our young people. We are changing direction away from the misguided view that teachers are there to impart knowledge, towards a model where the outcomes and experiences focus on how our young people are learning. Teachers are now able to focus on developing their skills 'engineering' learning environments in which high quality learning can take place.
It is thrilling to witness the impact of this transformation. Our teachers now have more freedom to express themselves and take calculated risks. Our young people have a greater opportunity to become more active - rather than passive - in their own learning. A very powerful point made by Dylan William when I heard him speak recently: "learners create learning!" The job of the skilled teacher now is to focus on creating the right conditions in which meaningful learning can happen.
I was recently reminded of this when chatting with a P7 class about an interdisciplinary project they had been involved in. The main focus was maths and the study was based on that of a football manager. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. One of the
P7 girls said: "When I heard we were going to be doing a maths project and it was about football I thought, Oh no! But I was wrong, it was brilliant! Working as part of a team helped you to be a better thinker."
In our schools, I believe we can see young people becoming more motivated and enthusiastic about their learning. The emphasis is on motivation and fun. Developing in our young people the attributes described in the four capacities.
I am encouraged to see emotional health and wellbeing given a high priority in CfE. Relationships are important in creating a positive climate in the classroom. Our young people, now more than ever, have the opportunity to be engaged in active, collaborative interdisciplinary learning. They are now being encouraged to take more responsibility for their learning - thereby increasing personalisation and choice.
Our classrooms will now, more than ever, need to be places where mutual respect is evident and the individual learner, teacher and the learning experience are valued highly.
However, this can bring challenges for schools. We need to make sure that our teachers have access to high quality continuing professional development. I believe there are exciting and creative ways to achieve this. Teaching no longer should be an activity carried out in isolation. We need to utilise the best practice within our own school clusters, authority and beyond.
The challenge of resourcing is an issue which has to be considered carefully. Schools need time to plan, time to collaborate and find ways to work together.
CfE represents the vision and ambition to take our schools forward, reflecting on what we do well and deciding how to do better. The entitlements are no more than our young people deserve.
CfE is a good start. However, the challenge now is to ensure that this is translated into the experience our learners have in the classrooms of Scottish schools.
An FE perspective
by Hugh Paton, Senior Lecturer, Anniesland College
Teachers should be prepared for years of adjustment as CfE beds in, if the experience of the Further Education sector is anything to go by.
Hugh Paton, GTC Scotland's elected member for Further Education and Senior Lecturer in Flexible Learning and Learning Resources at Anniesland College in Glasgow, told Teaching Scotland that the ramifications of similarly sweeping changes, called the Action Plan, introduced in Further Education more than 25 years ago, were still being felt.
"I don't think staff in the school sector are wrong in having concerns, because even 25 years down the line we still face challenges with assessment. I think it all comes down to confidence - teachers' confidence in the systems and confidence in the teaching profession.
"There is no question that teachers are competent, but they have to be given the capacity to take on board the whole new range of things that it has taken FE 25 years of ups and downs and real sweat to cope with, and we are still working on improvements, especially with the developments in technology and methodologies."
Hugh said that while teachers have the professional knowledge and skills, he saw assessment - especially summative assessment - as being a particularly challenging and demanding area. He said provisions in the ten-point plan announced earlier this year by the Scottish Government to support teaching staff in their CPD were good steps, because assessment was an accountability issue.
"We have a responsibility to learners, and other stakeholders, to ensure that our 'assessments' are correct.
"One of the things FE went through was around the credibility or currency value of some of the awards that were coming out. The stakeholders (especially employers) wanted to know exactly what they meant, so there has to be a big communications exercise to make sure all the stakeholders know exactly what is happening with assessment. It has to be appropriate, valid and reliable and it also has to be practical and sustainable.
"Under this new system, teachers will be more accountable and I think teachers are happy to take that role on so long as they have the support and the resources. This is a change of culture, it's not just a change of process, and I don't think we should underestimate it or undervalue the effort that staff will have to put in."
He said the FE sector could, and would be willing to, work with and support teachers in the CPD area, with FE colleges being a repository of experience and expertise in the area. "There are new opportunities, but challenges and demands come with them. We all want to grab these opportunities but we have got to be pragmatic about it."
University challenge - measuring success
by Prof Peter Tymms, Director of CEM, Durham University
CfE provides a unique and exciting vision for the future of Scottish education, and in doing so it sets serious challenges for those interested in assessment within schools in Scotland. While teacher judgement is rightly given central importance, Building the Curriculum 5 also makes it clear that there is a need for reliable and valid assurance mechanisms. Tracking pupils' progress and comparing standards across schools and authorities also feature prominently on the agenda.
Traditional pencil and paper tests would not sit comfortably with the new vision, but recent technological and theoretical advances have created possibilities that can transform the process of assessment.
Imagine an individual sitting down at a computer with headphones on, listening to, or reading questions, and responding to them. The computer is not a passive page turner, but asks the next question according to how the individual responds to the first. As time passes, the computer progressively focuses on the respondent's frontier of understanding and knowledge. By assessing in different areas it is quite possible, within a short space of time, to produce a profile of strengths and challenges for every child in a class. This can be tracked over time allowing teachers to work on the challenges, remediate them, and then integrate the information with professional judgement to check that their work has been effective.