Curriculum and Learning Design

The first two rounds of reporting left this cell without records, and the reason lies with the instrument rather than with teaching practice. A survey that asks which policies exist will identify policies; it will not identify a revised course unless a teacher volunteers an account of one. The third round asked how use had changed over the preceding year, and it is this question that elicited the relevant accounts.

The responses describe a sequence rather than a single event. Use begins with work requiring no pedagogical judgement, such as summarising a text or generating a list of ideas, and subsequently extends to work that does require such judgement: assembling the material on which a course runs, drafting the assessments that measure it, and shaping the activities through which students work. One teacher describes this movement as routine practice, while a second describes the same work in terms of what it produces.

The cell nonetheless remains the least populated in the curriculum row, and the reason for this has not changed. A design decision taken by an individual teacher leaves no document that an institution files. Such a decision reaches a synthesis of this kind only where a question elicits an account of it, and the count recorded here therefore reflects the frequency with which the question was asked as much as the frequency with which the practice occurs.