Trends in education and they way in which children and young people are taught in schools is constantly evolving, and has changed a fair bit in recent years. Teaching and learning used to be centred around test scores and strict academic ability, with very little flexibility within learning methods to allow children to achieve to the best of their ability. With the introduction of CfE, however, teaching and learning is now much more flexible, with opportunities for each individual child to flourish. There is now much more room for different ways to work, and for healthy debates when it comes to a difference in opinion between students.
The progressive educational trends of the IB are as follows:
- critical analysis
- student choice
- transdisciplinary
- range of skills-testing
- constructivism
- child-centred
- education of the whole child
- criterion referenced
- AV and AL (languages)
- open-plan rooms
- multiple perspectives
More than one of these trends align with CfE, for example, CfE is also a very child-centred curriculum, as it focuses on building up each and every single child to become successful learners, effective contributors, confident individuals, and responsible citizens. It also takes into account that children learn from a variety of visual, aural and kinaesthetic teaching. Incorporating all three of these learning styles into it, CfE shows that it has the best standard of achievement for each individual at its heart. Furthermore, entwined within CfE is GIRFEC, meaning that every decision a teacher makes has to consider how each child in their care will benefit from this decision, conveying CfE’s child-centred mission.
Furthermore, most schools employing CfE incorporate a lot of student choice within their lessons. A lot of IDL topics are left open, so that the children can decide what they would like to know more about, and thus what their topic should be. Similarly, unlike in past times, CfE allows for a lot of student discussion and expression, allowing for multiple perspectives to be expressed and accepted.
A lot of CfE schools nowadays have – or are at least trialling – open-plan classrooms. I have taught CfE in both open-plan and closed-plan classrooms, and in my personal experience, I feel that younger children (mainly primary 1 and 2) benefit from having an open-plan classroom. It allows for access to more different people and resources, and makes that introduction to teamwork and sharing all that much easier and comfortable for children at that young age.
Overall, there is clearly an overlap between the educational trends of CfE and the IB curricula. Both are very clearly centred on placing the child in the middle and working around them to allow each child to flourish to the best of their own ability in a variety of different situations.
