Objective: This paper explores the expectations of teachers to contribute to fostering students' wellbeing in the revised Norwegian curriculum. A new construct in the curriculum is three interdisciplinary topics -- health and life skills; democracy and citizenship; and, sustainable development -- included to give priority to prevailing societal…

Since the passing of No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 (NCLB), teacher autonomy over curricular decisions has been restricted. As a result, state and local school districts faced increased pressures to adopt highly prescriptive and standardized literacy curricular programmes. Given this context, literacy curriculum adoption has become a widely…

Curriculum decisions are increasingly seen as technocratic or bureaucratic problems, rather than democratic issues that must be deliberated over. As such, curriculum decisions are placed in the hands of a small minority of bureaucrats and business elites who assume the only purpose of education is to prepare children for college and/or the labour…

This paper explores the challenges for teachers in positioning them as independent curriculum makers. History teachers in New Zealand have recently entered uncharted territory with the abandonment of prescribed topics for history and a new-found authority to determine the selection of historical knowledge taught to their senior secondary students.…

The purpose of this paper is to comparatively investigate the professional autonomy of upper secondary school teachers in three European countries in interpreting and implementing curricula. The paper focuses on teachers' experiences, and their perceptions of their autonomy and the control exercised over them in the global era of neoliberal…

Curriculum materials and knowledge about curricular purposes and structures are valuable tools that teachers often draw upon to organize instruction and facilitate student learning. Careful analysis of teachers' curriculum implementation and the decision-making that undergirds their curriculum use is critical for fully understanding enactment.…

Shows how a matrix, developed for identifying various strategies of curriculum development, can provide a basis for making a policy analysis of alternative strategies. (RM)

Proposes seven principles of program evaluation to serve as guidelines for designing evaluation procedures in Australian schools. The object of evaluation is to generate useful information about the educational environment which can be used for decision making in the curriculum development process. (AM)

Changes in instructional staff prompted development for different methods of conducting a three year course for college students. The author conducted a research survey during the change and determined that decision making in areas of business are dissimilar to those in education, the latter being rarely final, taking a great deal of time, provoke…

Explores curriculum developers' differing opinions before they design a specific curriculum; the amount of convergence of opinion caused by curriculum deliberations; and the retention of that convergence. Finds that, despite frequent discrepancies of opinion before curriculum conferences on design issues, subsequent deliberations produced a high…

The arts of perception, i.e., the arts that enable curriculum workers to see and make use of the significant and particular features of problematic situations, are discussed. The ability to discriminate and give meaning to details has received scant attention in the literature on practical curriculum problem solving. (RM)

Investigates the extent to which Australian teachers participate in curriculum decision making. Evidence is presented from the Curriculum Action Project (CAP) initiated in 1976. Topics discussed include purposes of CAP, methodology, data analysis, and findings. Conclusions are that curriculum development is becoming less centralized but that it is…

Increasing numbers of schools in Great Britain are using curriculum notation and curriculum analysis to assist them in decision-making and curriculum review. The purpose of and criteria for assessing a management information system are examined. (RM)

Explains teacher participation in curriculum development as consisting mainly of adoption or modification of existing curriculum and/or of developing curriculum as part of a project with which they are involved. Describes a workshop in which teachers developed a study unit on geography. (Author/DB)

Curriculum deliberation is an approach to constructing, operationalizing, and evaluating curricula. The essay describes the deliberative format, discusses habits that impede deliberation, and makes suggestions for the amelioration of these habits. (RM)