Seamless learning from proof-of-concept to implementation and scaling-up: A focus on curriculum design

Abstract

Many educational research projects focused on designing curricular innovation or establishing design principles for guiding curriculum design and teacher facilitation that work well within specific contexts. When the curriculum is scaled up from one class to all classes in one grade level in a school, the design principles need to be fine-tuned iteratively to work well in more diversified contexts through a process of design-based implementation research. This is one main consideration in the trajectory of moving a curricular innovation from the research phase to implementation and scaling phases. This chapter addresses the broad challenge of understanding how more successful research innovations can proliferate to more usages, adoption and adaptation across levels of the education system in the context of seamless learning. This is done in the context of scaling up a seamless learning curricular innovation in a Singapore school. We focus on the articulation of principles for designing the curricular activities that adhere to the spirit of seamless learning and that have the potential for sustainable and scalable implementation by teachers.