ABSTRACT
Allow me to offer a brief portrayal of a scenario that typifies curriculum implementation as I know it: Within a Curriculum Branch of the Ministry of Education, someone in an administrative role as curriculum director summons a group of teachers and perhaps a university professor of education hand-picked for their reputed excellence in teaching (not necessarily for excellence in curriculum development), sets them the task of developing a curriculum in a subject area. Usually, there is included a token evaluation (pilot testing is the legitimated jargon) done usually by hand-picked teachers. Minor revisions are made, Band Aid fashion. (Full-scale revisions are usually impossible because the time-line administratively pre-set prevents such an overhaul.) Then, the massive undertaking of implementing the program in all the schools of the province is begun. In school districts implementation inservice days are declared. The experts-in-the-know hop from school district to school district providing “communiqués” to assembled teachers who, under a high level of anxiety and frustration, attempt to understand it all in a one or two day session. In the meantime, the Assessment Branch's psychometricians develop achievement tests to measure teacher effectiveness indirectly by measuring student learnings directly. The teachers on whom the success of the implementation depends try their damnedest to make sense of the new curriculum, wondering if they should commit themselves to the new curriculum, or if they should make visible token commitments, or if they should make the program relevant to their own students, or if they should compromise between what they have been doing and what they are expected to do.
