The Honeymoon
When my international school decided to change curricula, there was genuine excitement. School leaders and board members travelled to see the program in the country where it began. We visited well-resourced schools and met educators who knew the curriculum inside out. It was easy to picture what it might offer our students.
The team supporting our transition was generous with its time. We discussed textbooks, instructional hours, and the practicalities of bringing the program into our school. They listened to our concerns and seemed excited to work with us. Other schools in the region were already using the curriculum, which gave us confidence.
Everything was caviar and champagne.
We introduced the curriculum in two phases, beginning with one part of the school. The first year had its share of unanswered questions and delays, but teachers and leaders found ways through them. From a distance, it seemed to be going fine.
The following year brought a much larger rollout. More teachers were now working with the curriculum every day, and issues that had been manageable at a smaller scale became harder to work around. The cost was higher than we had expected. Some resources and timetable requirements were proving difficult to fit to our setting. We had planned for a transition; we were now living with its daily demands.
I had expected a difficult period. What I had not expected was how hard it would be to tell which difficulties were temporary and which were telling us something about the fit of the program itself.
When the Plan Reached Classrooms
At first, I responded the way I usually do when something needs attention: I got involved. I arranged more professional learning, went back through the textbooks and adjusted the timetable again. Each change solved something, but another question soon followed.
We had spent a year preparing. I wanted to believe that more time and support would settle the problems. Yet I kept hearing concerns from different teachers, across different year levels. Some were about workload; others were about what could realistically be taught and assessed in the time available. I needed to know whether these were the ordinary frustrations of a new program, gaps in our implementation, or signs that parts of the plan did not suit our students and school.
I could not settle those questions by revising the timetable again. I needed a closer look at what was happening in classrooms.
Looking More Closely
I began meeting teachers individually and spending more time in classrooms. I looked at student work and assessments alongside the plans we had made. I asked students about their learning. I wanted to see where a concern appeared once, and where it appeared again in another classroom or year level. I also looked for parts of the curriculum that teachers and students were responding to well.
This did not mean leaving teachers to manage problems alone. We continued to make changes where students needed them. But I became more deliberate about recording what had prompted each change and whether it helped. Otherwise, I could keep adjusting the implementation without learning why the same difficulties returned.
The record was still incomplete, but it gave us a more useful starting point than another quick assurance that the next adjustment would solve everything.
Where We Are Now
And that is as far as this story has progressed. We are not standing triumphantly on the other side of our curriculum transition. We have not concluded that everything worked exactly as planned. Nor have we concluded that the change was unsuccessful.
We are still in the middle. My role now is to support, observe, listen, and, perhaps most importantly, be honest about what we are finding.
Looking back, one of my clearest lessons is that listening should have started earlier. Formal observations and individual teacher meetings should not have been something I intensified once problems became apparent. They should have been part of the process from the beginning.
There are also three lessons I will take from this experience regardless of where we eventually end up.
1. Distinguish Resistance from Evidence
We know that people can be resistant to change. There are entire models, books, TED Talks, and professional development sessions devoted to getting people on board with something new. Because of that, resistance can become an easy explanation when implementation is difficult.
Sometimes it is the right explanation. But not always.
I have learned to force myself to stop before deciding that a problem is about attitude or personality. Is the same issue appearing across different year levels? Are teachers who normally embrace change raising similar concerns? Is it affecting student work? Are we seeing the same problem in different classrooms or subjects?
The answers may still point to a teacher who needs more support, training or accountability. But they may also point to something larger. The important thing is to find out which it is.
2. Don’t Rescue So Much That You Obscure the Problem
When things go wrong, a leader’s instinct is often to step in. Mine certainly is. But when you have your hands on every timetable, textbook, lesson plan, and decision, it becomes increasingly difficult to see what is actually working without you.
There is a balance between providing support and inadvertently holding an entire system together yourself. Teachers need coaching. Leaders need guidance. Problems sometimes require intervention. But eventually the people responsible for implementing a curriculum need to be able to implement it.
Stepping back can feel uncomfortable, particularly when you can see an immediate solution. But it can also reveal things that constant intervention hides.
3. Report What You Find, Not What You Hoped to Find
This may be the most difficult lesson. Curriculum change requires investment. Boards approve budgets. Leadership spends months planning. Teachers attend training. Families are told about the benefits. By the time implementation begins, a lot of people have good reasons to want the decision to succeed. I am one of them. That makes objectivity harder, not less important.
When I report to our Board, my responsibility is not to reassure them that everything is working. It is also not to persuade them that something has failed. It is to give them the clearest picture I can: what is working, what isn’t, what teachers are experiencing, what students are demonstrating, what we have already tried and what questions remain unanswered.
What happens after that may involve changes I support, changes I don’t support, or simply more time. But those decisions should begin with an accurate picture of the school rather than the picture any of us hoped to see.
Rethinking Success
I am also reconsidering what success actually means. When we began this transition, success seemed relatively straightforward: implement the curriculum well and make it work. I am less certain of that definition now.
If we adapt parts of the curriculum because they do not suit our students, is that unsuccessful implementation or good educational judgment? If we discover that teachers need considerably more time or support than anticipated, does that mean the transition is failing or that our original expectations were unrealistic? And if the evidence eventually tells us that something simply does not fit our school, would changing direction represent failure?
I don’t think I can answer those questions yet. Perhaps that is the most useful thing about writing this from the middle rather than waiting until I can package the experience into a success story. I don’t know whether we will continue exactly as we are, substantially adapt our approach, or eventually decide that another direction would better serve our students.
What I do know is that my job at this stage is not to decide what the ending should be and then work backwards to prove it. It is to keep looking carefully at what is happening, support the people doing the work, and make sure the people responsible for the next decision know what we are actually seeing. For now, that is enough.
Kendall Fairburn is an international school leader and educator based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. She currently serves as Director of Blueline International School, where she leads early years, primary, and secondary education. With more than a decade of experience in international education, her work focuses on curriculum development, school improvement, teacher development, and navigating the realities of educational change.
