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Tony Mays reports on a recent curriculum engagement in Botswana where he was required to support the Ministry of Education and Skills Development's curriculum development unit prepare outcomes-based or competency-based curricula for Botswana.
Botswana, like countries all over the world, constantly questions whether or not the education system is adequately meeting the country’s needs and whether or not it is maintaining, improving or losing its comparative educational ranking in the global knowledge economy.
The related specific objectives of the consultancy were:
- To assist the curriculum sub-sector with an understanding and practice of preparing outcome-based learning / competency based learning curriculum linked strongly to appropriate assessment patterns.
- To provide specific technical advisory support to the Ministry of Education and Skills Development and the curriculum department in respect to the transformation of curriculum in relation to the Education and Training Sector Strategic Plan goals. In particular, to enable curriculum experts in their task of preparing up-to-date curriculum based material based upon practical training on developing learning outcomes.
Using a practical workshop methodology it was expected that a group of curriculum experts at the end of the training would be able to:
- Describe the essential elements in the structure of programmes to be developed based on outcomes-based learning;
- Outline general principles relating to outcomes-based learning curriculum;
- Develop constructively aligned Intended Learning Outcomes, Teaching and Learning Activities and Assessment Tasks for their respective curriculum;
- Identify and develop new and innovative teaching activities through the deployment of a mixed mode / blended learning approach.
This discussion with colleagues in Botswana, particularly within the Department for Curriculum Development and Evaluation (CDE), represented an interesting walk down memory lane and a chance to reflect on other projects in recent years in South Africa.
Although the Department of Basic Education in South Africa has abandoned all reference to learning outcomes in its more recently published Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statements (CAPS), I assume that teachers still need to plan lessons and lesson sequences based on the CAPS documents and in doing so presumably still need to spell out their intended learning goals/purposes/aims/objectives/outcomes to do so? In addition, a lot of the work I do at Saide involves helping institutions to design programmes and their constituent courses and materials and for accreditation purposes the formal outlines of all the related documents are still built around intended learning outcomes. So it feels a bit like OBE is dead: long live OBE!
There are multiple approaches to and understandings of OBE (Lawson & Askell-Williams 2007; Spady 1992; 1994) and much of the work that I and others do would probably be classified as Curriculum-Based Outcomes approaches rather than OBE as advocated by Spady. However, I continue to believe that an outcomes-oriented approach that sees learning as an integration of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values and is future-directed to complex life roles can support the development of applied graduate competences although it requires more careful planning for learner engagement (including planning related specifically to diversity and inclusivity). There needs to be a greater emphasis on formative, continuous assessment and use of a wider range of resources and teaching strategies (Gultig et al 1998; Killen, 2000; Maree & Fraser, 2004). However, we need to be pragmatic about assessment, support and resourcing needs and requirements and should not lose sight of the fact that critical engagement with existing knowledge and creation of new knowledge remains at the heart of a curriculum geared towards preparing learners for participation in a knowledge-based society (Berlach 2004; ESSTP Programme 1).
So what did I advise and what did my Botswana colleagues decide?
As it happens, Botswana’s school curricula are already expressed in terms of what learners should be able to know and to do with what they know. I also thought that it was likely that a radical redesign of the curriculum starting with a blank sheet of paper and designing down from complex life-roles was unlikely to be something that could realistically be achieved in a 15-day consultancy or even a 50-day consultancy. The result would probably be a school curriculum still based on language, maths and various contextual interpretations of learning how to know, to be, to do and how to live together (UNESCO, Delors 1996; Tawil & Cougoureux 2013). Also, a separate project was already well underway pursuing a Spady-inspired design down OBE approach to develop an alternative curriculum for out-of-school youth.
So, the advice seemed obvious from the perspective of a pragmatist like myself. I advised that rather than invest in a complete re-design of the school curriculum, Botswana might rather invest time and effort in continuous professional development helping teachers to design more interactive, goal-oriented and systematically designed lessons that would require evidence of learner achievement and progress. I further suggested that they continue as planned with the alternative curriculum for out-of-school youth and supported the idea that before signing off they undertake a comparative review of the school-based and out-of-school curricula from the perspective of conceptual and skills development in order to build bridges between the two.
At the time of writing, the jury is still out on the first recommendation but work continues on the second. I wish my new Botswana colleagues all the best in their endeavours.
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