Investigating Estonian teachers' expectations for the general education curriculum

Abstract

Finding a balance between a centralised and decentralised curricular policy for general education and seeing teachers as autonomous agents of curriculum development is a recurrent issue in many countries. Radical reforms bring about the need to investigate whether and to what extent different parties - and first of all, teachers - are ready to accept and internalise the new policies and roles as curriculum leaders to ensure the sustainability of curriculum development. The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of a questionnaire for investigating Estonian teachers' curricular work and preferences and to introduce the results of its piloting. The main topics covered by the questionnaire are teachers' experience and autonomy in using and developing curricula, their preparation for curriculum development and preferences and expectations for the best curricular solutions. The developed questionnaire can be used for investigating teachers' curricular work and preferences in different national contexts, thus enabling comparative studies across countries with different practices regarding curriculum policy.