Teachers in this study generally have positive views on the school-based curriculum (SBC) designed for the English elective Workplace Communication. I use the word “generally” here
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because the SBC that I developed, as mentioned in Chapter 2, is not impeccable, and teachers in this inquiry also gave some constructive comments on how to improve the SBMs during the interviews. However, their attitudes towards the SBC are overall positive. To begin with, a report on the extent to which they covered the SBMs will be given below.
Teachers in this inquiry all used the SBMs for their teaching on a voluntary basis and covered most content. Miss Joey and Miss Sussie, for example, explicitly mentioned in the interviews that they had completed the SBMs from cover to cover. Miss Tina also covered 90% of the content, but she skipped the pages that provided a list of useful expressions and phrases used for a job advertisement. The pages were intended to put in the SBMs as an appendix to help students complete a job advertisement, but Miss Tina thought that her students should have the basic ability to guess some of the meanings in the list. As for Miss Mitchell, although she did design some extra assessment and lesson activities for students, which will be discussed in greater details in the section 3 below, she still went through the materials very quickly.
Whilst teachers in previous studies about government-led SBCD programmes in Hong Kong (Lo, 1999 and Law, 2001) also covered the school-based curriculum comprehensively, the extent of coverage, therefore, did not mean that teachers held positive views on the SBCD. One reason was that the teachers in the former studies were forced to follow the official guidelines to deliver the materials in order to produce standard learning outputs (Lo, 1999). As such, they might not be able to exercise discretion by skipping or altering the school-based materials to cater for learners’ diversity. Thus, besides probing into the coverage of SBC, an analysis of the teachers’ comments is necessary.
In this qualitative study, all the four participants indicated their support for the SBCD in the researched school. All of them mentioned explicitly during the interviews that the curriculum developed by the school was able to cater for learners’ diversity:
Miss Mitchell: In our SBC, we gave them a passage that is similar to what they are
going to write, so they are exposed to it. And after that, we teach step by step at different stages, like the introduction, the actual reason for such and such, reason one, reason two and then the conclusion. I think it's very good for weak students. (Interview Data)
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Miss Joey: [My views on the SBC] is positive because the things we produced can
be manageable. The language we use in the SBC is easier, which caters for our students' level. The cost is also much lower because students don’t need to buy a textbook. But the cost of [writing the materials] is very high. (Interview Data)
Miss Tina: I gave my full support for the SBM. It was really developed in
accordance with our students’ levels. (Interview Data)
Miss Sussie: I think the SBMs could save us the time used for planning how to teach
writing. We only have to follow the materials, step by step. It really saves our preparation time. Our school has prepared something that the textbooks don’t provide but that caters for our students’ levels. (Interview Data)
The above excerpts not only show that teachers feel positive about the school-based curriculum, but also point out the reasons for their support such as catering for students’ diversity, saving costs on textbooks for students and reducing teachers’ preparation time. These are the advantages that are supposedly found in SBCD (Skilbeck, 1984). Nevertheless, previous case studies on government-led SBCD programmes show otherwise (Wong, 2002). In Lo’s (1999) case for example, teachers were busy attending workshops organized by the then Education Department and preparing documents to apply for funding. Pushing students to produce outputs for official display, teachers were unable to teach according to the students’ levels. Although the government-led SBCD programme was finally implemented at the classroom level, the teachers merely put it up as a one-off initiative in order to secure the funding. Lo (1999, p.463), therefore, concludes:
... the nature of the [School-based Curriculum Project Scheme] was promoted as a means to pursue the goals commonly associated with SBCD, namely the identification and satisfaction of pupils' needs, and of teachers' involvement in curriculum development. In reality, the scheme was highly centralized and resulted in the Education Department's maintaining control of the process and products of the scheme. It is therefore, a bureaucratic version of SBCD which stressed the one-off production of classroom materials.
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Compared to Lo’s study (ibid), the SBCD in this inquiry was initiated and implemented by teachers themselves as opposed to a centralised effort. Thus, instead of adding workloads to teachers as shown in previous studies, this case study showed that SBCD could help teachers reduce their workloads especially in terms of lesson preparation time (Miss Sin, Interview Data). Also contrary to Lo’s (1999) study where the true meaning of SBCD did not come across, teachers in this case study could make use of materials that aim to cater for pupils’ diversity.
Fullan (2008, p.121) suggests that in order to make the school-based curriculum successfully go into the classroom, three Ps: “personalization (addressing each child’s learning needs), precision (tailoring the instruction to the needs without getting prescriptive), and professional learning (where each and every teacher learns every day” are indispensable. From the interview data, it can be seen that the first P, personalization, has been addressed by all the participants. All of them used the SBMs not because they wanted to acquire the funding, but because the materials were personalized and written at the students’ level.