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It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it (2):
Managing
the Hidden Curriculum
The Programme
The Post-Graduate Certificate in Education and non-graduate Certificate in Education programmes in Post-Compulsory (i.e. post-16) Education at De Montfort University (UK) have been running in broadly the same form since 1996. They are offered by the university itself and at the time of writing also by six other associate Further Education (Technical) colleges under franchise provisions. The programme is a two-year, part-time (roughly one day per week college attendance) course for practising teachers in all sectors of post-16 education, including higher education, vocational education (both college- and work-based), adult education, training in public and armed services, etc. The post-graduate and non-graduate variants are taught together, and differentiated by assessment requirements. The programme as a whole has about 500 students across the seven centres. (From a research perspective, this means that the student group experiences the same course, in terms of requirements and regulations, but different centres are taught by different tutors in different environments; while the research design cannot accommodate formal control groups, such environmental variables do to a certain extent allow incidental factors to cancel each other out).
The programme set out to be clear about its underpinning values and that it was both a course about adult education and also an example of it, inviting scrutiny at both levels. The explicit values were in keeping with Knowles' principles for andragogy, insofar as these could practically be adopted within the constraints of the university's system.
Moreover, the programme adopted certain distinctive practices to embody those values; in this way it was intended that all the "messages" sent by the design, at both formal and informal levels, would reinforce each other and enhance the learning opportunities for this non-traditional group of students. Staff from all the three original centres were actively involved in (not merely consulted about) the design process, and strong efforts were made to ensure that as more centres joined the network, new and replacement teaching staff were inducted into the approach.
Among the practices were that the course was;
- Firmly �outcomes� based, so there were;
- No formal attendance requirement (at first); this was later revised at review in 1999. This was not because students themselves had avoided attendance, but because employers has used this loophole to evade releasing them to attend.
- No �assignments�; there were of course requirements for assessed work, but these were not "assigned" by tutors. Instead, we adopted a system of;
- Student �submissions�, based on
- Learning contracts. Students themselves decide on what work they need to produce in order to meet the evidence requirements for the respective module outcomes, and negotiate its suitability with tutors via the contract.
- No grading; instead, either;
- �Credit can be claimed� and
- �Further work required before credit can be claimed� (Two such judgements for a module mean that it has to be re-taken from scratch)
- Up- and down-grades
- Disconnecting final qualification from prior qualifications. Thus entrants to the programme without graduate-level qualifications, who demonstrate that they can nevertheless work at the higher PGCE level have a formal mechanism to step up to that level; and graduate entrants experiencing difficulties with PGCE requirements (usually related to external circumstances) can step down to Cert. Ed. level.
So the course team had set out to make explicit aspects of the curriculum which would otherwise have been hidden, through the programme's policies and procedures. They took pains to ensure, through a particularly comprehensive programme handbook, that the rationale for all these procedures was clear to the students, and that they had clear guidance for unfamiliar aspects, such as negotiating the submission proposals, or learning contracts.
The Research
The research programme is on-going, and necessarily based on the principles of grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss, 19??). "Necessarily" so, because as researchers the team were aware that they did not know specifically what they were looking for, other than that its interesting features would probably go beyond their intentions as managers and tutors on the course. Of course, any research undertaken by the course team themselves could not be "pure" grounded theory, in the light of their prior knowledge of their intentions in the design and delivery of the course.
Nevertheless, the basic research question is;
What do students learn from the course apart from what we set out to teach?
Methodology
In embarking on the research, it was soon apparent that we had a great deal of data from an extensive archive of material which, while not gathered for the purposes of the research, was illuminating once read in the context of the research question.
Quality assurance procedures for professionally-accredited courses in the UK are both extensive and intensive, and the audit trail is detailed. Thus the programme under consideration was subject to;
- Initial university validation in 1996
- Re-validation in 1999
- Accreditation by the then Further Education National Training Organisation (later to become Standards Verification UK) in 1999
- Accreditation by the then Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (later the Higher Education Academy) in 1999
- National Quality Assurance Agency review in 2001
- SVUK re-accreditation in 2004
- HEA re-accreditation in 2004
- Ofsted inspection in 2005
In connection with all this inspection regime, and standard university procedures, the programme also holds;
- Two course boards (management) each year (apart from assessment boards), which include student reports from each centre.
- Two or three "network tutor meetings" each year
and keeps a programme log and action plan which is subject to scrutiny by the Education Subject Authority Board and the Faculty Academic Committee, as are the routine reports from the programme's external examiner. All this material is minuted and archived.
It is of course an interesting question as to the messages sent to the academics working on the programme by such rigorous scrutiny. While we tell the students how much we trust them to learn, the university and other bodies tell us how little they trust us to teach...
There is also substantial email contact between tutors and students which is automatically archived (in the event, only one such item has been used, anonymously, for illustrative purposes), as well as routine module evaluations by questionnaire and discussion, and the informal evidence of tutorial meetings with students (although for ethical reasons we did not refer to individual tutorial records).
For the purposes of the current research, we drew on this existing material, on focus groups conducted for research purposes in 1999 (Atherton, 2000) and triangulated with a focus group in one centre in February 2006. We do not draw on student survey material, which has been held up for technical reasons at the time of writing.
From the ethics point of view all the documentary material, at the level at which we refer to it, is potentially in the public domain in the UK under the Freedom of Information Act. Material from focus groups was obtained�with the explicit consent of the participants�by audio- or video-tape (or in one case by note-taking because of an objection by one participant to recording).
Findings and discussion
In many respects, these are the least interesting aspects of the research�to anyone else except the course team. We make no claim about their generalisability, apart perhaps from the first theme, which is consistent with the findings of one author concerning in-service courses in another discipline. For this reason, the findings and discussion are here elided; they may be regarded merely as illustrative of the kind of material which might emerge from readers' own efforts to research the hidden curricula of their own programmes.
Overall, five themes were identified:
- The first concerned the course as an event; or the fact that it is offered.
Students identified that for many of them, the sheer existence of a professional development course (any course, not necessarily this one), represented a recognition of their need for "training" in teaching. They are all accomplished practitioners in their own disciplines, but not necessarily teachers of it, and they value the opportunity to learn about teaching.
They drew different conclusions from the support (and occasionally hindrance) they received from their employers, which (given that at the time of the research the course required no fees from student or employer) sent clear, if variable, messages about employers' investment in staff development.
For some in the university cohort (and this may well not apply across the whole programme, where many students study within the same institutions as they teach in), the sheer physical travel to another institution, and working with fellow-students from a variety of settings, allowed them to gain some psychological distance from their setting and their practice, and promoted more objective reflection.
Discussion; This finding says nothing about the design of the course in question. It could apply to any such course. It does however say a lot about the message sent by the provision of a course, in;
- its recognition of students'/staff needs, and
- the employers' investment in meeting them, and hence
- how much staff are valued.
It is interesting that this theme has been consistent across the years; it was also evident in the 1999 groups. Since then, gaining accreditation through a programme such as this has become a requirement of employment in many further education settings, but this has not so far significantly affected the stated motivation of actual participants. (It should be noted that there are also less onerous and academically demanding alternatives available to the constituency, so the current sample is potentially biassed.)
Of course, the message is not always heard in the same way. In a different context, one of the present authors interviewed a participant on an in-service course who was adamant that being "sent" on a course was a vote of no confidence in her present practice.
This is about what the course represents to the participants. In most cases it is the positive heritage or legacy our students bring. We can perhaps invest it wisely and develop it�although they may not notice. What they will notice is whether we squander it.
- The importance of the course group
The programme keeps a cohort together throughout the two years, and so they get to know each other well, and this was commented on favourably.
There is a history of dispute about cohort sizes across the programme (for reasons of finance and staff/student ratios) but in practice the students have experienced relatively consistent group sizes of 18-30.
They value the consistency of the group, of getting to know and making friends with fellow-students over two years, and also of the variety of experience brought to the group by their fellow-students. It has long been the practice of tutors to note the duration of teaching experience each student has brought to the course; cumulatively it is always greater than the combined experience of the tutors, and this has been pointed out.
So they value their learning from each other. They may well value it more than tutor input. The course provides a forum for the exchange of experience and ideas which is highly valued.
The programme requirement for them to undertake "peer observations", i.e. watch each other teach, has frequently been cited as one of the most valuable aspects of the course experience.
Discussion; Whereas the first theme was a gift which could only be respected or squandered, this theme touches on course design. At the most basic level it suggests limits to the size of a given cohort in any one centre, scheduled together. It also supports the present model of a programme where the group stays together for the two years. No doubt some students are disadvantaged by this if they find it difficult to integrate with the group�and there is some evidence to suggest that this occasionally happens�but for the majority it clearly enhances the learning experience. (It may be noted that there is no evidence that exclusion from a group has occurred on any grounds of gender or race or first language; there is insufficient evidence so far on disability or sexuality, which remains unrecorded.)
What this finding does begin to touch upon is the value which tutors place on the group interaction and mutual learning within it. This principle is enshrined within the course values, and the findings imply that it is important that it is supported by the teaching strategy. It may be, however, that such mutual support and learning within the group would evolve regardless of tutor efforts, and that it may simply be a function of the course structure.
- Socialised students
Graduates reported that they find the course more difficult than do non-graduates. This is not simply because the assessment requirements are more stringent for graduates (although they are), but also because of their prior experience of higher education;
Graduates have more formed assumptions and expectations about learning, acquired through their own student years; in particular they find the assessment regime unstructured and disorienting. As Atkin (1998) noted in an earlier paper about the programme, they are more likely to ask the tutors, "Just tell me what to do�give me an essay title and a number of words, and I'll do it!"
They also have clearer assumptions about marks and grades; despite extensive feedback on the scripts of their submissions and on the marking sheets attached to them, they maintain that without a numerical or literal grade, they do not know how their work relates to the required standards.
But, they report, they get used to it
Discussion: This finding has been consistent since 1998; Atkin, for example, reported of the cohort he studied (we quote at length because of the inaccessibility of the original paper);
The programme outcomes are deliberately written in non-contextual terms to accommodate the full range of those working in the post-compulsory education system. However specified learning outcomes, like any written law, suffer from the curse of generality; they are given life only by their interpretation. It is this generality that is central to the learners, certainly initial, view of claiming credit. All but two of the group � who themselves were involved in the management and assessment of NVQ schemes � expressed repeated concerns about the nature and level of evidence required to met the learning outcomes. At the initial stages of the programme it was very difficult to communicate to the learner what was required and in what format � much of this information was readily available within the student handbook, [but] subsequent discussion established that very few learners had read the handbook. This tends to support the conjecture that at the beginning of any learning process the complexity and volume of the programme structure would be best left to one side. Learners were unable to articulate why a piece of work had, or had not, met the learning outcomes. At this stage guidelines on the volume of evidence required were ignored with learners adopting a scattergun, more the merrier approach to evidence rather than focussing on the quality of evidence. Despite the opportunity the process provides to diversify the nature of evidence the learners showed a general reluctance to stray from the written submission � this was in line with their previous educational experience of assessment and consequently attempts to provide alternatives were viewed as unsatisfactory in some way.
During this period of learner familiarisation � which lasted much of the first year of study � learners would ask individually and collectively for further guidance and clarification about the requirements of the assessment process, �just tell me what you want me to do�.
Graduates therefore found the assessment regime more disorienting than did non-graduates. It should be noted, however, that the hidden curriculum of previous training for the latter students quite possibly helped them in some respects. The idea of assembling a portfolio of evidence to support a claim for credit was quite familiar to some of them, because it is the assessment model underpinning the UK "National Vocational Qualifications" scheme, used in much of the vocational training offered in the UK. These students, however, were in turn not familiar with the requirements for critical thinking on the programme; they had been socialised to accept uncritically the "received wisdom" of technical practice.
Discussion; This finding poses an important question for innovative or just unusual programmes. To put it ethically; do the ends justify the means? Or economically; what is the cost/benefit analysis of adopting procedures which may be theoretically preferable, but whose unfamiliarity temporarily disorients students and may interfere with their familiar patterns of learning?
- The present authors would not agree with part of Atkin's final quoted paragraph, concerning the duration of the "learner familiarisation" period. They would further submit that for both graduate and non-graduate students, the "de-stabilisation" of previous assumptions about how to "take a course" is a necessary component of encouraging them to make connections between taught theory and practice at work.
Nevertheless, the question posed is an important one; one had better have very good reasons for not conforming to student expectations.
There is however another factor which may make socialisation difficult for students to overcome. They are themselves teachers. This re-surfaces in theme five.
Atkin's points relate to the first two years of the programme, since when the induction process has improved and students have been offered a "dry run" opportunity to tackle part of their first submission.
- The Insecurity of Choice
- The taught content of modules (particularly in year two) is largely selected by a given student group from a proffered "menu", which is intended to help them see that the tutors cannot "cover" all its content, so that they will have to read and work outside the taught sessions; and also to give them some sense of ownership of the use of taught session time.
- As noted above, students' submissions for assessment are negotiated through learning contracts.
- Moreover, in the case of the "Professional Discipline" module, some of the learning outcomes themselves are negotiated.
This issue is related to the preceding one, and is another sub-text of the cry; "Just tell me what to do!"
The programme calls for a great deal of negotiation;
According to Knowles' notion of "andragogy", all this should enhance their motivation and engagement. But the evidence of some of the students, vigorously opposed by others, is that the superficial lack of boundaries is disconcerting. Whereas the previous point, on previous socialisation, could roughly be correlated with prior experience of higher education, there seemed to be little such relationship on this matter.
Following the delivery of this paper, two of the authors were involved in the programme's Spring Symposium (residential event; see here for more detail). At the heart of the Symposium are the discipline-based Interest Groups, which are self-managed by the students. In the evening review sessions of the day, and in the final evaluation, a vociferous minority of participants called for;
- tutors to be present in all the Interest Groups to chair and direct them, and
- formal registration of participant attendance at each session.
(This call was met by bewilderment from other participants.) This was interpreted by the tutors as a desire for greater structure and direction, and as a denial of what one tutor present referred to as the principle that this was a "course for grown-ups".
For once, there is quantitative evidence about this call; in the evaluation questionnaire, participants were asked whether the Interest Groups achieved the right amount of structure. Only 10% of those responding said "not enough", with 77% maintaining the structure was "about right" (2% said there was too much structure; n=82). The numbers as such are therefore not significant.
Discussion; the low numbers of the minority call for more structure notwithstanding, the theme of insecurity persists. In part it is a function of theme three, and the de-stabilisation experienced by participant students. But in part it is also the learners' equivalent of "writer's block" when confronted with a blank sheet of paper.
The point of giving the students freedom to work in their own way is to enable them to take risks with their learning, rather than engaging in a slavish reproduction of received knowledge. Some take to this more readily than others, and for some the lack of obvious boundaries is more inhibiting; they retreat from risk-taking because they do not experience a secure base.
The programme's response to this has been (inter alia) to produce a substantial programme handbook, with a great deal of detail about the procedures and policies of the programme. The current edition is about 150 pages, and the course mantra in response to any query is, "It's in the handbook!" It is not only what the handbook says, but also what it represents�"The tutors have thought this through; they're not just making it up as they go along."�which sends a message to the students. For some, however, it is clearly not enough.
Here there may be a message which is only vaguely received�an instance of an attempt to manage the hidden curriculum which works only partially.
- Modelled Practice
The final theme draws more heavily than the others on students' experience and practice after the course. Because a substantial proportion have no further contact after graduation, apart from requests for job references, it it more selective and perhaps anecdotal. More systematic research in this area is ongoing.
On the the other hand, it permits a different perspective on the hidden curriculum, in that it is about what former students have actually done. This perspective is basically to ask, "If this was the outcome of the course in terms of changed practice, what must the curriculum have been to get to this point?"
We hope that it goes without saying that successful students have become more confident and proficient teachers. Indeed, the Ofsted report on the course in 2005 commented on;
"well-motivated and enthusiastic trainees who often make good progress in developing their teaching skills"
The findings reported here, however, are some of the less expected outcomes;
- Success on the course, without accompanying change to on-going practice at work
- Adoption of course principles and design as a "recipe" for practice, even when inappropriate
- Modelling programme tutor behaviour, again not always appropriately.
The first category of former students must be the most disappointing; the programme goes to great lengths to align all the curriculum messages�formal and informal, overt and hidden�to develop changed and improved practice. And it should not be possible to pass the course purely on the basis of "talking the talk" without "walking the walk", as current jargon has it.
Nevertheless, subsequent encounters with a minority of students have shown that while some of them have acquired a new language with which to discuss their practice, that practice has not substantially improved. Thus a specialist health and safety trainer continues to use the same materials as beforehand, and relentless bullet-pointed presentations; although it has to be said that he is somewhat constrained by the policies of his employer.
Similarly, a teacher of basic skills, who wrote very sensitive assessments which insightfully discussed the teacher's self-presentation among other things, still continued to present herself as timid in the classroom. She had written about the importance of presenting a model of assertive womanhood to female students from ethnic minority communities in which women had little voice, but her gentle manner�re-assuring and encouraging though it was�failed to display the range of assertion which she wrote about. Perhaps her assessments represented her aspirations rather than her achievements, and it is indeed difficult to change the habit of a lifetime of gentle deference (even within the theatre of the classroom); but the evidence of the course is that the learning was insufficient to overcome the barriers to such change. (Perhaps that is as it should be; a complete self-presentational make-over for students would imply induction to a cult rather than an educative process. Please discuss!)
It is risky to generalise from these (and of course, other) vignettes; but the theme throughout concerned the failure (if that is what it was) of students to take the risk of moving from a concern with their own teaching, to that of their students' learning. This is one of the most significant of the shifts which Fuller (1970) long ago identified as a marker of development from the "middle phase" (competence) to the "late phase" (professionalism) of teacher development. It is also implicit in the Dreyfus' (1986) model of professional development, particularly in the transition from competence to proficiency, in their terms.
Into the second category, of inappropriate practice, must come the case of the fire-fighter who fell in thrall to the idea of reflective practice. His training efforts hitherto had largely been about drilling teams time and again to perfect their complementary activities smoothly under hazardous conditions; he came on the course and discovered reflection. And having discovered it, he saw it as a panacea for training... We had a vision of his firefighters crouching in a circle behind a truck, reflecting on the significance of their practice�while a 'plane exploded behind them. It's unfair, but illustrates the issue of uncritical adoption of a particular context-dependent model of teaching and learning. In reality, B. became much more sophisticated in his application of the ideas, and later proceeded onto the MA programme.
The third category parallels the second, although in this case various former students attempted to reproduce the tutor behaviour from the course, with problematic results. As tutors to this programme, our approach was predicated on the programme values, which explicitly emphasise the maturity of students, and how much they are trusted to learn. Having found this approach liberating for themselves, some students assumed that it would also work for disaffected 16-19 year old students. It doesn't.
Discussion; What the programme's managed hidden curriculum failed to communicate in these cases was its context-dependence; what works in one situation does not work in another. The problem with managing the "hidden" curriculum is the difficulty of making it explicit enough to be debated; this come back to the "content/process" or "digital/analogue" distinction in the previous section.
Most students achieved what may (pompously/academically) be labelled as a "contextual transcendence"; they appreciated the appropriateness of the programme design for themselves, in their situation, and with their degree of maturity. Some, however, did not, and took the values as absolute; only to be dismayed and disappointed by the response. Perhaps the first category discussed above realised the mismatch and simply kept programme learning at a distance, adopting a merely instrumental approach to gaining the qualification and accreditation.
Conclusion
There isn't one
We have discussed the broad findings of one case of a programme which attempted to enlist the "hidden" curriculum to reinforce and enhance the overt curriculum. We have no comparative data with other programmes, so we do not know how much "better" it was/is in achieving its objectives.
- The only possible basis of comparison is the Ofsted reports; unfortunately these are contaminated by political and strategic concerns. Across the country, all but a few of the very long-established programmes offering a full-time route to the qualification received a grade of "3-adequate" including this programme.. The others received a "2--good" rating. There were no "1" or "4" ratings
The point of the exercise is not to produce definitive, valid and reliable "results" which can be published and proclaimed to the world. The circumstances and context of the programme discussed are complex and unlikely to be reproduced elsewhere. Instead we have sought to demonstrate the usefulness of a perspective for evaluation which is largely neglected. and to encourage others to benefit from it.
References
ATKIN C (1998) '"Just Tell Me What To Do"; reflections on assessment on an outcomes-based programme' Paper delivered at a conference on After Dearing; implementing the National review of higher education Swansea, April 1998 [return]
DREYFUS H L and DREYFUS S E (1986) Mind over Machine: the power of human intuition and expertise in the era of the computer Oxford: Basil Blackwell
HANSON A (1996) "The Search for a Separate Theory of Adult Learning: does anyone really need andragogy?" in R Edwards, A Hanson and P Raggatt (Eds) Boundaries of Adult Learning London: Routledge/Open University