The Department of Curriculum and Instruction works on the part of schooling that is easiest to describe and hardest to get right: what is taught, how it is taught, and how anyone knows whether it worked. Our expertise is concentrated in three strands — curriculum design and evaluation, language and literacy education, and STEM and digital pedagogy — and each of them is pursued in ordinary classrooms as much as in the literature.
Much of that work is done with schools rather than about them. Colleagues run lesson-study cycles with partner primary and secondary schools, trial teaching materials in timetabled lessons, and advise on curriculum planning at panel and whole-school level. Research on Chinese and English language teaching and biliteracy sits alongside research on technology-enhanced learning across the STEM subjects, and the two meet more often than the labels suggest.
What is learnt in those classrooms feeds back into our undergraduate, postgraduate and professional development programmes, and into the advice we offer schools and curriculum bodies. The strands set out below describe each area in more detail.