The curriculum work of teachers is understood and conceptualised in different ways. A prevalent view is that teachers are an integral part of a system of transmission and their work with curriculum essentially a technical exercise. Some form of this view seems to be assumed by policymakers, parents and at least some teachers. However, when this…

Debate exists about the role and value of teaching spelling in the middle years of schooling. The increasing use of assistive technology in schools, has prompted questions about the time devoted to teaching spelling. Yet spelling and writing continue to be the means through which students are assessed as they move through school. In their study of…

Economic, social and environmental changes place high demands on teachers and teacher education. Consequently, teacher education is challenged to design curricula that respond to and anticipate changes. Curricula are value-driven and even though part of these values might be constant, the relative importance of values and the values themselves may…

In Europe, with the dissemination of curriculum autonomy policies, teachers tend to be more involved in curriculum reforms as curriculum designers. In Portugal, in 2016, the government unprecedently commissioned eighteen teachers' associations to define a curriculum benchmark -- 'Essential Learning'. Studies have shown the difficulties felt by…

Over 60 years of technology development, transformation of educational policy and curriculum innovation in Ireland have resulted in the introduction of the Computer Science (CS) subject in Post-Primary (PP) Education. CS has always been conceived digitally and the Digital Learning Experiences (DLE) enacted through its curriculum are strongly…

Amidst views by teachers that they are not involved in decisions about curriculum making, Caribbean orality provides a way of knowing and transmitting knowledge reflective of the dynamics of the local context and the meanings people make of the spoken word. Caribbean orality provides the opportunity to understand how teachers make sense of…

There are increasingly frequent calls for school mathematics curricula to be informed by robust research evidence. One approach to achieving this is designing evidence-informed learning and teaching resources for the classroom. In this paper, we reflect on our experiences of designing a free and fully resourced complete set of secondary…

In England, the development of teachers' curriculum design capabilities has been identified as a 'challenge remaining' (Department for Education [DfE]. (2022). "Opportunity for all: Strong schools with great teachers for your child."…

The "System of Competency-Based Curriculum Design" (SCCD) framework was developed to meet the requirement for reform in competency-based education and overcome the limitations of Understanding by Design (UbD). This comprehensive framework, incorporating knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values, aligns with competency ingredients as…

The COVID-19 pandemic has made abundantly clear how far our school systems are from being crisis-ready. The lockdowns seen across many parts of the world left schools and teachers scrambling to provide parents with whatever teaching materials they could find to enable some semblance of distance learning to take place. Despite heroic efforts, the…

Disruptions to higher education teaching have raised significant concerns over the best curriculum design for teaching online and for the inclusion of all students. Universal design for learning (UDL) together with curriculum research models -- taxonomy of significant learning and integrated curriculum design (ICD), provides a curriculum approach…

In this paper, we interrogate and justify the design of a local project that used collaborative design research in a secondary school in England. As authors, we represent teachers and teacher educators engaged in design research, whereby we acknowledge the difficulties implicit to university and school collaborations within a performative culture.…

Curriculum reforms often fail because teachers are asked to implement approaches to teaching and learning that are contrary to their beliefs about students and how to teach them. Since curriculum reforms are attempts to resolve particular educational problems, failures in implementation produce parallel failures to resolve the problem for which…

Personal values influence goals and motivate actions. The case study reported in this paper explored whether an understanding of values would provide a useful framework to guide the co-creation of the undergraduate cognitive psychology curriculum at a UK University. A design team composed of staff and students ran two co-creation workshops to…