ALAN Carroll's letter (June 6) urging the scrapping of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), deserves a lengthier response than can be contained in a letter, so I will confine myself to three observations.
First, having taught for "almost 38 years" Mr Carroll will also have experienced the implementation of Standard Grades in the 1980s. As a depute head at the time, my vivid memories are of a hugely stressed teaching force, teacher strikes and an administrative process as fully deserving of the word "shambles" as Mr. Carroll applies to CfE's implementation.
Secondly, CfE evolved from the extensive National Debate on Education, started in 2002 in response to mounting dissatisfaction with the failure of the existing curriculum "to ensure that Scotland's children and young people were equipped for life and work in a globalised society". This debate led to the establishment of the Curriculum Review Group and the eventual production, in 2004, of the widely supported Curriculum for Excellence Aims and Principles paper.
Thirdly, as so often happens with would-be radical change, there was in my view a failure to recognise that a radically new set of curricular ambitions represented a paradigm shift in educational thinking which required a similar paradigm shift in teaching and assessment practice. Renowned management consultant Stephen R Covey describes how our mental models of the world determine our behaviours. He uses the analogy of road maps to illustrate how it is impossible to operate effectively in a completely new intellectual environment with a mental model still attuned to the old environment. It's like trying to find an address in, say, Dundee with a road map of Aberdeen. And that, I fear, is at the heart of the "shambles" that Mr. Carroll so vividly describes.
The only way of dealing effectively with this problem is through intensive staff development in appropriate pedagogical theory and practice - and as I know from personal experience, this is intrinsically expensive. But without it, Scottish education will continue to operate with out-of-date pedagogical mental models and so the laudable aims of our new curriculum will remain unreachable, in an intellectual environment for which we have the wrong road map.
Colin Weatherley,
The Paddock, Gullane, East Lothian.
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