What Annoys Me as a Teacher in the International Curriculum Business
Long post alert. Blame my whiskey, it was too potent for a weekend!
There is an interesting game being played in the booming educational market. Curricula have become brands, schools compete through claims of innovation, and pedagogical frameworks circulate rapidly through conferences, consultancy programmes, professional networks, books and social media. In this environment, adopting something new can itself become a sign of leadership. A new framework, lesson structure or instructional model arrives, and suddenly an institution feels compelled to demonstrate that it is moving with the times.
There is nothing inherently wrong with innovation. Education should evolve, teachers should question established practices, and institutions should respond to new evidence about learning. The problem begins when the desire to appear innovative becomes more powerful than the obligation to establish whether an innovation is actually necessary, appropriate or better than what is already in place. This becomes particularly consequential when an institution has already committed itself to an established curriculum with its own pedagogical philosophy, methodology and assessment structure.
The question is not whether schools should innovate. It is who gets to innovate, on what basis, and at whose expense when the innovation turns out to be misguided?
Students and parents are buying more than a school building
Students and parents choose a curriculum because they trust the curriculum. When a family chooses the IB, it is not merely choosing a collection of subjects. It is choosing an established educational philosophy, curriculum architecture, assessment model and understanding of teaching and learning.
If institutions plan to dilute the same curriculum with their own cooked up fantasies, they should be upfront with it and inform the students and parents at the time of admission that, "Hey, we are offering IB but we want to mix our own nonsense to it and treat you like guinea pigs of modern education and its tomfoolery." They are paying you, so be honest.
The point is not that schools cannot contextualise a curriculum or develop their own practices. Of course they can. The point is that there is an ethical difference between professional implementation and quietly turning an established curriculum into the foundation for an institutional experiment that parents were never told they were buying.
The product being offered should correspond reasonably honestly with the product being advertised.
The curriculum is not an empty container
When an institution has already agreed to the curriculum that it will be following them like Protestants to Bible, it cannot change its word and start adding some other shite to it later on and become like evangelists to Bible.
That may sound deliberately irreverent, but there is a serious point underneath the humour. An established curriculum is not simply a syllabus onto which a school can attach whichever teaching model happens to be fashionable. The IB already has a substantial pedagogical architecture through its Approaches to Teaching and Approaches to Learning, alongside subject specific aims, objectives and assessment requirements.
This does not mean that the IB is beyond criticism. It is not. Nor does it mean schools should blindly reproduce everything the IB says. But if an institution has chosen the IB, it should be able to distinguish clearly between what belongs to the curriculum, what belongs to the school's own philosophy, what is evidence-based practice and what is simply institutional preference.
If the school wishes to supplement the curriculum, that is one thing. If it wishes to replace elements of its pedagogical logic with a compulsory institutional model, that requires a much stronger justification.
The problem with pedagogical fashions
Contemporary education has developed an extraordinarily efficient market for pedagogical ideas. New approaches are packaged, renamed, simplified and redistributed at remarkable speed. Some emerge from serious research. Some are useful interpretations of existing research. Some are promising but insufficiently tested. Others are simply old ideas wearing new clothes.
This creates a danger because the language of evidence can make almost anything sound authoritative. Put "cognitive science", "metacognition", "21st century learning", "inquiry", "neuroscience" or "student agency" on a PowerPoint and an ordinary teaching strategy can suddenly acquire the appearance of a scientific revolution.
But evidence for a particular practice does not automatically constitute evidence for the entire system someone has constructed around it. Evidence that retrieval can help memory does not prove that every lesson must begin with retrieval. Evidence supporting explicit instruction does not prove that every subject should follow an identical instructional sequence. Evidence supporting modelling does not prove that every classroom should be choreographed around modelling, guided practice and independent practice.
The journey from research finding to compulsory institutional template is much longer than educational presentations sometimes acknowledge.
Expertise cannot be replaced by exposure
There is nothing wrong with a school leader discovering a new pedagogical idea and wanting to explore it. Curiosity is valuable. The problem arises when exposure to an idea is mistaken for expertise in the field.
If you want to appear like a pedagogical leader, who invents random shite from online websites run by nuts, or cheap-ass books bought at airports (because you read only when you are made to sit in a flying pressurized metal tube for hours!), then you should definitely rethink your career choices.
You cannot put thousands of students and parents and hundreds of teachers at risk with flawed learning and overestimated experience.
The humour is intentional, but the criticism is serious. Reading a book about pedagogy does not make someone a pedagogical researcher. Attending a workshop does not establish expertise. Finding an attractive framework online does not demonstrate that it is appropriate for a particular curriculum, age group, subject or school.
The scale of the decision should determine the standard of evidence required. A teacher trying a new strategy in one classroom is making a contained professional decision. A leadership team imposing a new instructional system across hundreds of classrooms is making a systemic decision with consequences for thousands of students.
The latter requires considerably more than enthusiasm.
The guinea pig problem
Educational innovation necessarily involves some experimentation. Teachers try strategies, observe what happens and modify their practice. That is part of professional development.
But responsible experimentation has safeguards. There should be a clearly identified problem, a defensible rationale, appropriate evidence, professional expertise and some mechanism for evaluating whether the intervention actually worked. There should also be a willingness to abandon it when the evidence does not support it.
Institutional experimentation often skips several of these steps. A new idea appears, someone becomes enthusiastic about it, a presentation is made, and the existence of the initiative itself becomes evidence of innovation. Teachers are instructed to implement it, students experience it, parents may never know that it is happening, and evaluation becomes an afterthought.
The people who carry the cost are rarely the people who designed the initiative. Students experience the consequences in their classrooms. Parents pay for the education. Teachers spend their professional time implementing the system.
That is why the threshold for imposing a compulsory pedagogical model should be much higher than the threshold for suggesting that teachers explore a potentially useful strategy.
The danger of institutional overconfidence
Educational institutions have enormous influence over students, which makes institutional overconfidence particularly dangerous. There is a tendency to treat everything new as progressive and everything established as something that needs to be disrupted.
But established practice is not necessarily outdated simply because it is established. Experienced teachers spend years refining what works with particular students, subjects, assessments and contexts. That professional knowledge may not come with a fashionable label, but it can be far more valuable than an imported framework that looks impressive on a presentation slide.
Before replacing an existing practice, an institution should therefore be able to identify the problem with the existing practice. If the problem cannot be demonstrated, the case for replacing it is already weak.
The question should not be, "What new model can we introduce?" It should be, "What is not working, what evidence tells us that it is not working, and what evidence suggests that the proposed alternative will work better?"
That is a much more demanding question, but educational leadership should be demanding.
Standardisation is not automatically quality
There is a legitimate institutional desire for consistency. Parents should expect a certain standard of teaching, and schools need mechanisms for quality assurance. But consistency does not require every teacher to follow identical classroom choreography.
A school can standardise expectations, curriculum requirements, assessment standards, professional learning and broad pedagogical principles without dictating precisely how every lesson must unfold.
This matters particularly in the DP because different subjects involve different forms of intellectual activity. A close reading in English, a historiographical investigation in History, a practical investigation in Physics, a proof in Mathematics and a conceptual discussion in TOK may all require very different classroom structures while still satisfying demanding expectations for rigour, conceptual understanding, inquiry and assessment.
The sensible goal is therefore consistency of quality rather than uniformity of method.
The real question is what we are replacing
Every educational initiative has an opportunity cost. Time spent implementing a new lesson framework is time that teachers are not spending doing something else. Professional development devoted to one model cannot simultaneously be devoted to another. Classroom time spent following a prescribed sequence cannot be recovered.
Therefore, introducing a new pedagogical system should require more than demonstrating that it is potentially useful. It should require demonstrating that it is better than, or meaningfully improves upon, the practice it is replacing.
This is particularly important when the existing system already comes from an established curriculum with decades of development behind it. The burden should not automatically fall on experienced teachers to defend every existing practice against every new initiative. The burden should also fall on those proposing change to explain why the change is necessary.
What problem does it solve? What evidence supports it? What does it replace? How will success be measured? What happens if it does not work?
These are not unreasonable questions. They are basic questions of professional accountability.
Educational leadership should include restraint
There is a peculiar pressure in contemporary education to demonstrate leadership by constantly introducing something new. Yet genuine leadership may sometimes require the confidence to leave effective systems alone.
Innovation has value when it solves a problem. Change has value when it produces improvement. Professional development has value when it increases professional capacity. A new pedagogical framework should therefore be judged according to what it contributes, not according to how modern or impressive it sounds.
There is also nothing particularly innovative about rediscovering an old instructional practice, giving it a new name and presenting it as the next revolution in education. Educational history is full of these cycles. Ideas disappear, return, acquire new terminology and are marketed as breakthroughs.
The responsible response is neither blind conservatism nor blind enthusiasm. It is scrutiny.
What is the evidence? What is the context? What does the curriculum already require? What are teachers already doing successfully? What exactly is the proposed intervention expected to improve? And how will we know whether it actually did?
Sometimes the most professional educational decision is not to introduce another framework.
Sometimes it is simply to recognise that the framework already in place is doing its job.
The real responsibility
The educational market will continue to reward novelty. There will always be another framework, another acronym, another book, another conference and another supposedly revolutionary approach waiting to be adopted.
That is not necessarily a problem. The problem begins when institutions become so invested in appearing innovative that they forget that education is not a showroom for leadership ideas.
Behind every institutional initiative are real students, real families and real teachers. Parents are not purchasing an educational laboratory. Students are not consenting to become test subjects for institutional vanity. Teachers should not be expected to abandon carefully developed professional practice every time someone discovers a new idea.
If a school wants to introduce something new, it should be able to explain the problem, show the evidence, acknowledge the limitations, consult the professionals who actually teach and evaluate the consequences.
Most importantly, it should be willing to say "We were wrong" if the evidence eventually shows that it was.
That may be one of the clearest signs of genuine educational leadership.
The real mark of expertise is not the ability to introduce something new. It is the ability to distinguish between what is genuinely new, what is genuinely useful, what is already known, what is context dependent and what should simply be left alone.
In education, that distinction matters because the people carrying the consequences are not the people sitting in the leadership meeting admiring the latest PowerPoint.
They are the students sitting in our classrooms. #IBEducation #IBDP #InternationalEducation #EducationalLeadership #Pedagogy #TeachingAndLearning #TeacherAgency #TeacherProfessionalism #EvidenceBasedEducation #EducationPolicy #CurriculumDesign #EducationalInnovation #CriticalThinking #EducationReform #TeacherVoice #AcademicIntegrity #StudentLearning #EducationLeadership #ProfessionalJudgement #TeachingProfession
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