Page 60 - Jurnal Kurikulum BPK 2018

Figure 3. Action Space of Four Systems : Curriculum, Instruction,
Teaching, Learning (Macdonald, 1965, p. 4 )

CURRICULUM IMPLEMENTATION AS A SYSTEM

Much of the complexity of curriculum implementation stemmed from the consequence of
mass education where students across the system are expected to be taught the same thing, in
much of the same way with standard quality (IBE, 2013). There exist multiple levels of control
at school, school district, state and national level in the operation of curriculum implementation,
classroom instruction, teacher professional development and classroom assessment. Thus, what
ultimately happens in a classroom is affected significantly by decision making distributed across
the levels with multiple channels of influence (IBE, 2013). Although it is often lamented that each
teacher as the master of the classroom can decide on what and how to teach in his or her classroom,
it is also necessary to understand that the teacher’s decision is often influenced by regulations and
expectations set by higher authority in the system. These regulations and expectations could be
related to performance indicators, availability of resources, teacher hiring, budget, purchases and
peer’s acceptance. By treating curriculum implementation as a change process, these issues will
need to be addressed.
What is damaging is also that in many instances, education leaders or administrators view
change only as a product in the form of classroom instruction and students’ performance. There
is a real need to pay more attention to the process of establishing mechanisms that facilitate change
which ultimately support teachers’ classroom instruction (IBE, 2013). This requires us to look
upon curriculum as a system (Beauchamp, 1975; Ornstein, 1995; Saylor & Alexander, 1974). A
system consists of a set of inter related components organised to attain the ends (goals and
objectives) for which the system is established. With a system approach, the objectives are always
placed in the central of decision-making. System approach facilitates the planners and executors
of the plan, providing them a systematic and a comprehensive view on the whole process of
curriculum development including curriculum implementation. Beauchamp (1975) described the
system as consisting of the “personnel organisation and the organised procedures needed to
produce a curriculum, to implement it, to appraise it, and to modify it in light of experience”
(p.59).

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