Page 62 - Jurnal Kurikulum BPK 2018

Successful curriculum implementation often implies a change of habits, in another word,
it is a cultural change. Changes involving beliefs and values are difficult to implement though it
is not impossible, it takes time and persistence. Examples of such change are from teacher-
centered to student-centered learning, from focusing on national examination to school based
assessment. The stakeholders need evidence to convince them of the worthiness of such change
and to give them the confidence that this change will produce better outcomes. Often there is an
information gap between policy makers, curriculum developers and the implementers and society
at large. It is necessary to take into cognizance too that the policy makers and curriculum
developers have mulled over the change, have taken comparatively long period of time to analyse
the needs and design the change, they cannot expect the implementers and communities to accept
the change within just a short period of time.
Employing system management in curriculum implementation is yet another challenge as
working silo has been the norm in many administrations. Coordinating and ensuring coherence
among the various departments and agencies vertically and horizontally is more difficult than we
can anticipate and yet the success of curriculum implementation is heavily dependent on this
coherence. The process of planning, implementing, monitoring and evaluating various parts of the
system need intelligent and sometime shrewd maneuvering. Vision and objectives must be clear,
action plan strategic and thorough, agents of change and leadership identified.

EPILOGUE

Change causes uneasiness, it put us off balance for a while. This is especially so for change
in education systems which affect almost everyone in the society. People generally have a
tendency towards conservatism and try to maintain the status quo especially in the field of
education. Defensiveness often sets in making it difficult to even initiate the change. The biggest
challenge in education is to convince the huge numbers of implementers of the change and to
sustain that change. In order to ensure better success of curriculum implementation we need to
look upon curriculum implementation as a change process and develop the system to manage the
change. However, lest we lose sight of the core of curriculum change we need to keep instruction
and matters related to instruction as our center of attention, instruction is also the ultimate passion
of teachers in general and they are the main implementers in curriuclum implementation,
instruction matters to them.
Adapting ideas from Stake’s Congruence and Contigency Model(Stake, 1969), there must
be congruence between the desired and the actual reality of antecedents before the desied
transactions and outcomes of curriculum implementation can come to be realised. Examples of
antecents are as teacher characteristic, students’ attitude, availability of resources, these are the
pre-requisite for curriculum implementation. For the curriculum implementers to deliver what has
been put forth in the curriculum documents carrying the aspiration of the community and nation,
the support system and the antecedents must be in place, that we need a curriculum system to
maintain. It is time consuming and loads of work but there is no short-cut for curriculum
implementation.

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