A Model

About the Book

Because curriculum is everybody's business in schools, we tend to think of it as being managed. The reality is that curriculum in international schools is used continuously by a variety of individual educators, and it changes constantly, but not logically or efficiently.

The old curriculum development scenario was writing, shelving and rewriting the school's entire program, department by department, several times over many years. This schedule of departmental curriculum development made it nearly impossible to adjust to or document agreed-upon change outside the cycle. Although this was a tedious and inflexible way of developing curriculum, it was the only way because of high teacher and administrative turnover and limited technology.

Today we can do better because we have better tools. This book describes International School Curriculum Management through a model that we can see. Once visible, we can gain a degree of predictability over our curriculum development. Then we can figure out how to manage it, and write guidelines to protect our work over time, so that the curriculum system becomes as understandable as the school community, finance, and facilities systems.

The Curriculum Management System is a practical plan to manage curriculum in any international school, large or small, over the school's lifetime. It is in the form of a model that gives schools the means to analyze their curricular progress and move forward toward the next level. The Curriculum Management System is flexible and open to new research, trends and ideas. It is electronically accessible and easily updated. When indicators point the school to the next level, the Curriculum Management System should be ready to move too.

Although many of the items in the Curriculum Management System are familiar, the problem is that they are often left to function individually. As separate entities they cannot support one another and cannot form a systematic approach to curriculum development. This model makes the connection among these components at a curricular level clear and deliberate so a system can be created.

About the Author

Allow me to introduce myself. I am the person who, after living overseas and working in excellent international schools since the 1980s, discovered Curricular Groundhog Day. Just like Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day, in a curricular sense, I keep reliving my past.

I have spent years as a classroom teacher, as an EC-12 curriculum director in Kuala Lumpur, at Taipei American School, and in Colegio Roosevelt in Lima, Peru, and as an elementary principal in the American School of Warsaw in Poland. I've also been an international school parent and wife of another international school teacher, and thought I had a clear picture of curriculum and its development, until the last time I was offered a job. Surprisingly, the list of tasks in 2003 looked identical to the list of tasks I wrote for myself as the curriculum director at the International School of Kuala Lumpur many years earlier. Was the repetitive nature of curricular tasks a form of International School Curricular Groundhog Day?

I had to ask myself why the same issues were still on the table. My first answer was, "Curriculum development is a mystery!" Working from that premise, the solutions I'm proposing are the subject of this small but useful book, which describes the International School Curriculum Management System that will help us all stop Curricular Groundhog Day and move forward rather than in circles.