Curriculum Overload

„The curriculum is a mile wide, but only an inch deep!„

„There always seems to be too much to do!„

Teachers and students around the world have experienced stress or anxiety related to the quantity or nature of the school work required by their local curriculum.

Our ProjectBase on Curriculum Overload will help you learn more about how you can become an agent of change in your school community!

In 2020, the OECD released a global report on the concept of curriculum overload, outlining basic definitions, causes, consequences, and directions for solutions. Key to their findings where a focus on deeper conceptual learning, participatory curriculum development, and flexible learning pathways. These three areas of innovation represent the focus of our project, working to create more adaptive interactions between curriculum structure and student agency.

Guiding Questions

How can schools adapt to the continued expansion of human knowledge?

How can our local school work to understand, address, and/or prevent curriculum overload?

Strategies for effective action

What specifically can you do as a student or teacher?

This page is a growing resource linking to important literature, research, concepts, tools, and methods for engaging the complex challenge of curriculum overload.

Our project was originally inspired by this 2020 report from the OECD

Curriculum Overload: A Way Forward

OECD (2020), Curriculum Overload: A Way Forward, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/3081ceca-en.

For the first time, the OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030 project conducted comprehensive curriculum analyses through the co-creation of new knowledge with a wide range of stakeholders including policy makers, academic experts, school leaders, teachers, NGOs, other social partners and, most importantly, students. This report is one of six in a series presenting the first-ever comparative data on curriculum at the content level summarising existing literature, examining trends in curriculum change with challenges and strategies, and suggesting lessons learned from unintended consequences countries experienced with their curriculum reforms. Schools are constantly under pressure to keep up with the pace of changes in society. In parallel, societal demands for what schools should teach are also constantly changing; often driven by political agendas, ideologies, or parental pressures, to add global competency, digital literacy, data literacy, environmental literacy, media literacy, social-emotional skills, etc. This “curriculum expansion” puts pressure on policy makers and schools to add new contents to already crowded curriculum. This report aims to support reflecting on questions such as “how to avoid creating a ‘mile wide – inch deep’ curriculum?” and “how to shift a paradigm to curriculum centred around student well-being?” It also discusses the trade-offs tied to design choices.

Resources across the OpenEvo database

Curriculum Overload – MethodsBase

The home for methods useful in understanding and preventing curriculum overload in schools.