Teachers’ Concerns on the Implementation of the Standards-Based Curriculum in Ghana: A Case of New Juaben North Municipal

Abstract

The success of an educational innovation depends on the extent to which players embrace and implement it in the classroom. The study adopted the Concerns Based Adoption Model to assess the stages of concerns of pre-tertiary school teachers in the New Juaben North Municipality on the standards-based curriculum’s adoption in Ghana. Framed in the transformative philosophical paradigm, the study draws on survey design with quantitative approaches. The stages of concerns questionnaire of the CBAM was administered to 186 teachers sampled by convenience and stratified sampling approaches. The study found that the stages of concerns of teachers are ranked as consequence, informational, collaboration, personal, refocusing, management, and unconcerned; the socio-demographic attributes of teachers are not good predictors of their stages of concerns; with the exception of gender and the category of school teachers teach, statistically significant differences exists between their stages of concerns. Teacher engagement with curriculum committees to help identify students’ and teachers’ needs with the standards-based curriculum is recommended. Also, teachers should be involved in the development of future curricula. Attention should not be given to teachers based on their gender and whether they teach in public or privates schools because based on these variables, teachers are indifferent.