Which features of curriculums help teachers focus on their students’ thinking?

What is it about?

When students apply their learning to unique, problematic situations, guided by their self-knowledge, they are using a second-order level of thinking called metacognition. Like all skills, learning to manage complex problem solving develops with practice. However, engaging students with uncertainty, such as discussing ethical dilemmas or interpreting complex data, takes time. And unlike testing for subject knowledge, metacognition cannot be measured directly. This paper presents an analysis of five very different curriculums for students aged between 11-16, focussing on four subjects (English, social sciences, mathematics and science), for their unique references to three perspectives on metacognition. All the curriculums incorporated pathways for teachers to design lessons where students could practice metacognitive skills. However, the number of references to thinking about subject knowledge and thinking to learn, revealed two contrasting patterns. Curriculums that did not provide a lot of subject detail countered their broad subject knowledge with extensive guidance on how to design units (including interdisciplinary units) for inquiry learning. These curriculums had a strong focus on students ‘thinking to learn’, including managing student-initiated projects. In these curriculums, external assessment was largely optional. Teachers were expected and trusted to moderate their assessment of student work within their schools. Implicit in these curriculums was an understanding that teachers focused on the intrinsic benefits of education, including the development of children’s thinking. Curriculums that provided lots of explicit detail for ‘thinking about subject knowledge’ placed relatively less emphasis on the learner’s thinking and were consistently associated with external assessment. A high-stakes assessment is one where the outcome directly affects the educational future of an individual, but this is not the case for regular benchmarking tests that track students at intervals during their schooling, used with the US Common Core State Standards and the Australian Curriculum. This paper found the type of external testing did not affect the amount of curriculum detail.

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Why is it important?

Curriculums that provide a lot of detail present a view that teachers are the ‘transmitters’ of disciplinary knowledge. And because challenging students with uncertain, problematic knowledge is time consuming, and their responses are likely to be diverse and difficult to compare, the metacognitive dimensions of detailed curriculums are likely to be underemphasized during teaching.

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