Lack of shared curriculum planning creates "lesson lottery" in Aussie schools: report

SYDNEY, Oct. 17 (Xinhua) -- Without a coordinated, whole-school approach to planning, many Aussie teachers have to create lessons from scratch and scour the internet for teaching materials, according to a report released on Sunday.

"This creates a lesson lottery, and it undermines student learning and adds to the workload of our overstretched teachers," said Jordana Hunter, lead author and education program director from the Grattan Institute, a Melbourne-based public policy think tank.

Conducting a survey of 2,243 teachers and school leaders across the country, the team found that only 15 percent have access to a shared bank of high-quality curriculum materials for all their classes.

Even more troubling, teachers in disadvantaged schools are only half as likely to have access to a common bank as teachers in advantaged schools, the report showed.

"It's really the luck of draw whether or not a teacher will end up in a school which has a great bank of curriculum materials for the class," said co-author Nick Parkinson.

As the Australian Curriculum and its state variants provide high-level direction only, leaving vast gaps for teachers to fill in, the report stressed that teachers are crying out for change and schools need much more support.

The researchers estimated that it takes at least 500 hours to develop a year's worth of sequenced and detailed curriculum materials for one subject. For a secondary teacher in charge of four subjects, the workload can take up an entire year - about 2,000 hours, if they start from scratch.

Noting that whole-school planning "makes a big difference," the report indicated teachers can spend three hours less each week sourcing and creating materials, while for students the approach can effectively boost their knowledge by reducing the degree of variation in teaching and learning from one classroom to the next.

"Great teaching requires classroom instruction based on well-designed, knowledge-rich, and carefully sequenced lessons that build student knowledge and skills over time," Hunter added, calling on governments to make more investment in materials available for all teachers, strengthen curriculum expertise and closely review curriculum planning.