Teacher-Proof Curriculum

During the 1960s and early 1970s, curriculum reform efforts in many English-speaking countries led to the development of the “teacher-proof curriculum” as a central component of reform. As the term teacher-proof suggests, the aim was to minimize the teacher's control on curriculum development by creating a firm relationship among educational objectives, curriculum content, and [Page 865]assessment tools. The notion of the teacher-proof curriculum is a course of studies well structured, firmly integrated, well supported by rich and motivating materials such that teachers could not stand in the way of a direct transaction between the learner, the student, and the learning recourses the curriculum package.

The teacher-proof curriculum was designed by specialized curriculum experts, removed from the local school community, in a cookbook fashion so that any teacher who uses the curriculum will have the same results. In the teacher-proof curriculum, the goals (why), content (what), and methods (how) of instruction were prescribed for teachers within self-contained sequenced lessons. Further, educational objectives, curriculum content, and assessment tools were all packaged in a set of curriculum materials considered to be immune to teacher practice and belief. In this context, teachers and the local school community were to play a secondary role to those of national educational administrators and the curriculum experts: The aim was the accomplishment of high levels of commitment between the conception and practice of curriculum reform. Questions of curriculum change became the issues of managing the dissemination and control. The curriculum development process was seen as a technical exercise involving the setting of objectives and the measuring of outcomes, thus narrowing education to being a limited and technical activity. High-stakes tests were used as a measure of teacher effectiveness.

Similarly, the reform efforts on a developing discipline-based national curriculum in English-speaking countries during the 1960s and early 1970s has also reflected a somewhat centralized approach to curriculum change with the explicit aim of having a codified curriculum producing a new social order reflective of dominant groups. Curriculum control was a key subtext of these reform efforts. The endorsement of state-mandated high-stakes testing by policy makers and politicians legitimated the specification of instructional objectives and methods within the teacher-proof curriculum and resulted in the commodification of teachers' instructional practices.

Some proponents of the teacher-proof curriculum argued that teachers were so underprepared in their subjects that the curriculum must do everything for them. Thus, it must tell them exactly what to do, when to do it, and in what order. This view of curriculum assumed that there is a right way to organize and teach the curriculum, and that, if teachers have a curriculum that represents this right way, students will learn a subject matter well.

These curriculum models were framed by a fairly rigid set of assumptions grounded in the modernist education system. In other words, the curriculum development was set within a vision of schooling that is highly regulated in time and space, and that views knowledge as rational, linear, and arranged in separate and distinctive disciplines.

Research on curriculum development during the 1970s and early 1980s revealed the difficulty in achieving the goals of teacher-proof curriculum packages because the reform efforts failed to account for the temporal, social, economic, and cultural factors that define and guide the possibilities for change in specific school communities.

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