Building coherence and impact : differences in Finnish school level curriculum making

Abstract

The study aims to gain a better understanding on how curriculum making regulated by reform’s implementation strategy contributes to teachers’ and teacher communities perceived curriculum coherence, and further to the impact that reform has on school development. The two-level path modelling was utilised for analysing clustered data including the 75 schools and 1556 individual teachers from these schools during the most recent Finnish core curriculum reform. The results showed that the participatory strategy, including balancing the steering and transformative dialogue, seemed to be crucial both for promoting the individual teacher’s and professional communities’ shared capacity to process the big ideas of the new core curriculum document at the school level. Moreover, it promoted perceived curriculum coherence and further impact on school development. Participatory curriculum making strategy, balancing the steering and transformative dialogue in the curriculum making, seemed to be crucial both for supporting the individual teacher’s and professional communities’ in processing the ideas of the new core curriculum. Change management and knowledge sharing promoted perceived curriculum coherence and further reform’s perceived impact on school development for both individual teacher and teacher communities.