by Emma Louise Wheatley
Often in education, we assume that if teachers know what to teach, good teaching will follow.* Experience tells us it is rarely that simple. But if a curriculum appears to prioritise content above all else, what message does that send? No matter how carefully crafted a school’s mission or values, it can begin to signal that content is equal to learning, and that coverage is valued more than development.
𝐕𝐚𝐥𝐮𝐞𝐬 𝐯𝐬 𝐂𝐮𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐮𝐥𝐮𝐦
When I arrived at Kinabalu International School in August of 2025 as Head of Primary, my focus for the first 3 months was to ask lots of questions in order to really understand the school in its entirety: the people, the place, the values, and the culture. Some of these questions had clear, easy answers that helped me build my knowledge and understanding, but those around why we do things this way, and who we are as a team of educators were less clearly defined. This is not uncommon. KIS had, relatively recently, created and introduced a new set of school values, a project spearheaded by our Principal, Sam Gipson. The vision from Sam was clear: centre all that we do around shared and clearly articulated values – do the work that matters for our children. The challenge for me to pick up was also clear: how do we go from statements of our values to culture and identity?
This year we took this challenge on as a team in 3 key areas;
How do our values show up in daily life?(led to some amazing student-led work on a school-wide promise – a shared commitment to living into our behaviours)
What do we celebrate? (we swapped weekly generic certificates for values-specific awards that were a combination of staff- and student-nominated)
These were some early wins and ways to help build the familiarity and sense of shared value in both children and adults around school.
And then, the big one:
How do we ensure that our curriculum will support and drive our values?
As we consulted with leaders, teachers, TLAs, children and families, something became really clear. When we talked about learning & about what mattered to us, a pattern emerged consistently: everyone cared deeply about how we learned, what we did with the learning, what it could be used for & applied to; but this wasn’t the focus of our written curriculum.
Like many international schools, we aim for a solid foundation of learning by using a particular curriculum, supported by a set of resources designed to guarantee coverage in teaching.
There’s nothing wrong with this, and we absolutely had children learning and doing well. However, when it came to a sense of identity, belonging and ownership, our curriculum was not yet connected to or driven by our values; it didn’t feel owned by the school community.
Curricula are not neutral. The way we design, document, and use our curriculum goes far beyond shaping what teachers will teach; it shapes how they teach and, it shapes who they are as teachers.
And if something isn’t actively supporting your values & culture, it’s undermining them.
Building Culture Through Curriculum
So, what does it look like when curriculum actively builds culture, rather than quietly working against it?
In our case, it meant making some deliberate and, at times, uncomfortable shifts.
Firstly, we stopped treating curriculum as a map of “what to cover” and started treating it as a statement of “what matters”. This required us to go beyond knowledge and skills, and explicitly articulate the learning behaviours, dispositions and values that sit alongside them. Not as an add-on, but as an integral part of the learning journey. If collaboration, curiosity or resilience are genuinely important to us, then they must be visible in the curriculum itself, not left to chance or to individual teacher interpretation.
Secondly, we made the process collective. Curriculum design became a professional learning process, not a technical exercise. By involving teachers, TLAs, students and leaders in co-constructing the curriculum, we weren’t just improving documents, we were shaping a shared understanding of learning. Steadily, our conversations shifted from “what is this unit about?” to “what does it mean to learn well in our context?” and “how do we know this is making a difference?”. In this sense, the curriculum became a vehicle for developing teacher thinking, not just organising content.
Thirdly, we made learning visible. In this case, not student learning but our thinking about how the learning would happen. One of the risks of a content-heavy curriculum is that it allows pedagogy to remain hidden. By intentionally embedding references to how children learn best we began to signal that how we teach is just as important as what we teach. Over time, this starts to build consistency, not through compliance, but through shared understanding. And of course, is fully adaptable to your schools values and what your community believes and prioritises for your learners – something with incredible power.
None of these shifts required us to abandon academic rigour. Knowledge still matters. Progress still matters. Outcomes still matter. But what changed was the message we were sending to our teachers. We were no longer saying “cover this well”, we were saying “teach in a way that reflects who we are and what we value”.
𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐞
This is where the leadership challenge becomes unavoidable.
If curriculum shapes culture, and culture shapes identity, then leaders have to ask themselves some difficult questions:
– What is our curriculum really training our teachers to prioritise?
– Where are our values visible in the day-to-day decisions teachers make?
– And perhaps most importantly, where are they absent?
Because if we are serious about developing young people who are thoughtful, adaptable and values-driven, we have to be equally serious about developing teachers who think, adapt and act in those ways too. That does not happen through posters, assemblies or occasional initiatives on their own. It happens through the systems and structures that shape daily practice and curriculum sits at the very centre of that.
So, as you reflect on your own context, consider this:
– If a new teacher joined your school tomorrow and only read your curriculum documentation, what would they believe about learning?
– What would they prioritise?
– And what kind of teacher would your curriculum quietly encourage them to become?
The answers to those questions may tell you more about your school’s culture than your mission statement ever could.
Emma Louise Wheatley, Head of Primary, Kinabalu International School
LYIS is proud to partner with Beyond Classrooms