When Curriculum Expands, Something Has to Give

Back in 2012, long before AI entered everyday education conversations, I was working with teachers who were already grappling with a familiar tension.

“The curriculum is expanding — and rightly so.” “But we, as teachers, are carrying everything.”

Oracy. Collaboration. Assessment for learning. Cross-school exposure. All important. All necessary. And yet, each addition arrived with an unspoken assumption that teachers would somehow absorb the extra weight.

The problem wasn’t resistance. It was accumulation.

At the time, as a Subject Head, I was working closely with Sophie, the English Head of Department in a school, who was trying to expand learning meaningfully without exhausting her teachers. Oracy mattered deeply to her department. Assessment needed to evolve. Students needed authentic speaking opportunities beyond their own classrooms — especially in their PSLE year (the Primary School Leaving Examination, Singapore’s national examination). But we agreed on a hard constraint.

We would not add another programme on top of everything else. So I treated it as a design problem, not a delivery problem.

Instead of beginning with tools, I began by listening to teachers. What was slowing them down? Where did work feel duplicated? What support would genuinely help, rather than create more noise? That listening mattered. Teachers told me later that their voice shaped the design and that it was the first time in a long while they felt the system was working with them, not on them. Only then did we ask what the system could hold for them.

In 2012, this meant working deliberately with a learning management system — Ask n Learn not as a content repository, but as learning infrastructure. I had to contact the LMS manager and he agreed to allow inter-school collaboration using the platform and to suggest tweaks to the platform.

Rubrics weren’t separate documents floating around inboxes. They were embedded. Assessment wasn’t episodic. It was formative and visible. Prompts, reflection cues, and feedback lived where learning lived.

This work required restraint.

I listened before suggesting. I tested ideas gently. I revised, simplified, and stepped back whenever something didn’t serve learning.

When we expanded the curriculum, we did so carefully. Sophie and my team worked with students who were paired with peers from another school — learning buddies they had never met — and practised oracy together across three structured lessons in that high-stakes year. The platform carried the scaffolding. Teachers focused on listening, noticing, and guiding and not managing logistics or duplicating work.

The impact was tangible.

With shared rubrics and clear success criteria, students began giving one another rich, specific feedback. In doing so, they became clearer about expectations — and about what they themselves needed to work on. For the teachers, this meant something powerful: instead of chasing improvement across a class, they now had around 40 students making visible, high progress in their speaking, largely driven by peer feedback and self-awareness.

That shift mattered.

Teacher workload eased because responsibility for improvement was no longer held by the teacher alone. The system carried the structure. Students carried more of the learning. At the end of the programme, there was no presentation. No dashboard reveal.

Each student wrote a handwritten note to their buddy from the other school, reflecting on what they learned, how their confidence shifted, and what it meant to be heard by someone outside their familiar world.

In an exam year defined by performance, they ended with perspective.Looking back, the work wasn’t about doing more. It was about redesigning the work, not just digitising it… years before that language became common. About using technology to reduce cognitive load, not raise expectations. And about protecting time, boundaries, and teacher wellbeing , not as an afterthought, but as a design principle.

Which is why a recent Straits Times article on Singapore’s Ministry of Education continuing efforts to rethink teachers’ duties and ease workload felt so familiar. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/parenting-education/moe-makes-headway-in-rethinking-teachers-duties-continues-efforts-to-ease-workload-desmond-lee

It didn’t feel like innovation. It felt like recognition.

What would you subtract if learning, not busyness, were the goal?