Microcistinas

In many partner countries the formulation of policy is seen as a prestigious task, reserved for those with high status, and contrasting with the much less prestigious task of implementation. This is

strengthened by the belief that there is an inherent resistance among teachers and trainers against change and that, therefore, change is only going to happen when decisions are in the hands of policymakers. Consequently, change has usually been viewed by teachers as something ‘done to’ them as opposed to something ‘done with’ or done by’ them, which, of course, has not nurtured their commitment. Very often, “a teacher can use new curriculum materials or technologies without altering the

teaching approach. Or a teacher could use the materials and alter some teaching behaviour without coming to grips with the concepts or beliefs underlying the change.” (Fullan, 2001).

We will take curriculum reform as an example. Stipulating the objectives of curriculum reform means making a series of policy choices about new subjects competing for space in the curriculum, new knowledge that needs to be articulated, new student assessment methods, new textbooks and teaching materials. In addition to meeting the education needs and aspirations of the students, curriculum goals have to accommodate national, regional or local priorities, a range of social concerns, and the demands of industry and other sectors of employment. Policy choices about curriculum reform ought to be the result of compromises of various kinds and they reflect the assumptions and values of those who construct them. As a

result, specifying curriculum reform is a highly contested and complex process. In 2005, the ETF conducted a peer review exercise on “curriculum reform”87in four Western Balkan countries (Parkes and Nielsen, 2006). During the past decades, ETF partner countries have worked intensively in the area of “curriculum reform”, and since the mid-90s through different EU Phare initiatives, renewal of the vocational curriculum started in a range of vocational profiles. As part of this initiative, usually pilot curricula were developed and sometimes also

implemented. Often, in parallel with support from GTZ88, the renewal of three-year vocational profiles started in a restricted number of vocational fields. In some countries, governments initiated additional curriculum reforms – now in secondary general education. The case of Serbia is a typical one. Currently at least four types of curricula are implemented in some

vocational schools. One of them is the pilot curricula, developed with the support of the EU CARDS vocational training programme which started in 2003. There are 55 schools involved in this programme. There are also pilot curricula, developed with the support of GTZ (in 2002), implemented in 32 vocational schools operating in the areas of business administration, finance and banking. A third type of pilot curricula were developed as a result of an initiative of the Ministry of Education and Sport in 2001. This intervention was focused on the “modernisation” of the curricula for nine clusters of education profiles, implemented in 31 vocational schools during the school year 2002-03. In addition, traditional curricula which did not undergo changes are still implemented in most of the vocational schools.

Often, several of these curricula are used in one and the same school and a variety of reform programmes can be in operation simultaneously without mutual

coordination. This means that teachers are confronted with novelties which come

from different types of curricula and reform programmes. In some programmes they have to implement a “modular” curriculum, which introduces a different approach to student assessment compared to the traditional one, while in other cases they need to introduce “project based work” in the classroom. Although the objectives of curriculum reform are clear - to dismantle the old ideological curriculum and to offer a “fresh” look and new ideas - this all has a significant impact in the schools, which is not well understood by policymakers. Schools operating in this kind of change environment tend to jump from one activity to another, from one programme to

another, implementing many activities which most of the time are connected to different donor activities limited in terms of time and available funds. Bryk and his colleagues (1998) in the evaluation of the Chicago school reform refer to these phenomena as “Christmas tree schools.”

“Programmes range widely in content, purpose, and method, and they may include a variety of curricular,

instructional, social, and technological approaches [....]. The lack of coherence includes fragmentation of the

curriculum, fragmentation or lack of coordination in organizing the school day, poorly related or incompatible instructional strategies, inconsistent behavioural expectations, and the lack of a shared purpose and shared values.” With all these sets of diversified reforms active at the same time, the schools as institutions have changed. An interesting observation from the ETF peer review exercise is that policymakers see these various innovations as non-conflicting. It seems that policymakers and their advisors (most of whom come from universities and the field of science and have no relation to the practice of teaching) view schools only as factories that achieve (or don’t achieve) results and not as human organisations with their own structural and

87 “Curriculum reform” has at least a two-layer perspective - one which refers to teachers and how they

implement curriculum in the classroom, and the other which refers to policymakers and how they use it to reach systemic reforms.

88 GTZ is German Technical Assistance with a history of supporting countries in South Eastern Europe to

cultural rules, codes and heritage. They assume that policy instruments will ‘drive’ the necessary reform in schools. This technical or technocratic view seems to assume that schools are driven by relatively homogenous activities that can be ‘fuelled’ by a small set of easily

accessible policy instruments – like school framework curricula and vocational training profile curricula. ETF experience shows the contrary: schools are highly complex institutions driven by a mixture of interrelated rules, values and beliefs89. This is the context in which policies –sometimes even conflicting policies – are implemented. There is little evidence of direct and powerful relations between policy formulation and institutional practice in schools.

The ETF 2005 peer review exercise has provided a rich body of knowledge in relation to curriculum design and implementation initiatives that aimed to improve student achievement. The curriculum is still seen as a singleproduct prepared at the central level and not as a permanent decentralisedprocess,and the curriculum design process is largely decided on the basis of education

considerations with insufficient analysis of current trends and requirements. There is no effective mechanism to evaluate the relevancy and effectiveness of the curriculum (ETF, 2004).

The systemic curriculum design process is also weakened through centralised control. Curriculum planning needs to be interactive and participatory, with careful attention given to the lead client – the student. When planning and decision-making occur at central levels, curriculum is very inert, and much more time is needed for change. In addition, planning the curriculum at the highest levels cannot capture local conditions or stay abreast of changes in the communities. This system does not account for variation in need or capacity and, more importantly, provides no incentive for good performance of the teachers or school management.

In general, the peer reviews illuminate the fact that teachers were not opposed to the

new curricula, but there have been

numerous references to the short timescale in which it had been introduced. They also expressed fears about shortage of teaching materials and anxiety about newly

introduced student assessment procedures. Teachers pointed out that these new student assessment procedures caused quite a lot of disruption to teaching and learning processes in the classroom. Although teachers were strongly in favour of the modular curriculum, the peer review visit to pilot schools and discussions with teachers clearly indicate that the modular approach to curriculum design is a

paradigmatic shift in education and training in the schools. Active preparation for each class, active participation in student learning activities, permanent feedback on student progress through learning

sequences are all new requirements which the modular curriculum principle poses to the teachers - compared to delivering the traditional curriculum, teachers now need to do much more.

Certification and qualifications are major trouble areas for pilot schools where the new modular curriculum has been introduced. Modularisation and the recognition of modules in the certification awarded (at the present moment) give an additional burden to the pilot schools in terms of administration, complexity, regulation and communication (how student outcomes per module are recognised). Double administration of student records takes place in the pilot schools – the first one, where the teacher keeps records for each student as required based on the new modular curriculum, and the second one which is required by national legislation. This creates an additional workload for the teachers. The peer review visit to the schools and discussions with teachers revealed that after the Phare investment finished, the system was not able to provide enough financial resources to support the wider implementation of this type of modular approach. Consequently, at school level more intense paper use for modular teaching and assessment was exercised. Lack of equipment and consumables

proves to be one of the major obstacles for implementation of this curriculum. It seems that the lack of correlation between the structure of training and provision of didactic equipment is a general problem and it is considered as substantial by the schools. With the exception of computers, it is a fact that vocational schools in general are rather poorly equipped from the point of view of specialised technology. This makes implementation of any kind of curriculum difficult. Why are policymakers then interested in launching such reforms? The core of sustaining effective reform models is first and foremost to better understand the reform costs, the financing strategies to fund them, and the policies needed to sustain them. Effective policy aligns budget and national education functions with school leadership priorities. Indeed, despite the ambitions of formulated polices, very little seems to have changed in the schools. In education, the

persistence of the same old problems is infamous. Successive waves of reform have failed to achieve the improvements they promised, and many staff

development programmes have developed the cynicism of teachers rather than their expertise. The typical pattern when reform fails has been to blame the teachers rather than the designers. It now appears, however, that the designers’ assumptions are often at the core of the chronic failure of change efforts (Evans, 1996.

InThe New Meaning of Educational Change, Fullan (2001, p.3) argues:

“One person claims that schools are being bombarded by change; another observes that there is nothing new under the sun. A policy maker charges that teachers are resistant to change; a teacher complains that administrators introduce the changes for their own self-aggrandizement and that they neither know what is needed nor understand the classroom.”

Because of this frustration of both policymakers and teachers, one important issue is a search for an appropriate platform that will lead to an understanding of each others’

perspectives. In the complicated ‘all stakeholders’ picture in education in the partner countries it seems that the lack of communication between policymakers and teachers prevails in spite of the urgency of establishing such channels. It is important to devise mechanisms that can strengthen relationships between these two crucial groups so that their respective needs can be accommodated and so that existing tensions can be better managed.

One relatively easy solution is to strive for meaningful partnerships between different stakeholders that play important roles in educational change – in this case

policymakers and teachers. However, this is not easy to achieve since often the basis for all types of partnership is self-interest. As pointed out by Sack (1999), success in partnership depends on whether all concerned parties are explicitly aware of their own or their partners’ interests. Success is also promoted when the partners share a common desire to attain each partner’s mutual interests, while gaining mutual respect for each other’s interests.

Implementation problems arise when policy needs to be implemented in the schools by those who haven’t been asked for their opinion about the feasibility of the proposed policy (and most likely have never participated in the process of policy formulation and mapping policy choices). Exclusion of some stakeholders from policy formulation can have a dramatic impact in the phase of policy implementation90. The issue of consensus is also challenging, since public policymaking typically involves conflicts among competing stakeholders, which can be mitigated through policy dialogue91.

90 As an example, exclusion of the biggest opposition party from the process of policy formulation about

teaching reform, can be a catalyst for a significant crisis in the process of implementation after some time.

91 The UNDP 2002 policy paper:How to build inclusive policy processes: institutionalising the dialogue

between governmental and non-governmental stakeholdersidentifies that “policy dialogue not only implies an exchange of opinions but also the formulation of an agreed position and approach, and the matching of different, frequently conflicting, interest of social groups.”

THE POLITICAL