Across Europe and the wider world, curriculum reform has become an important means of addressing the changing needs of society and students whose world and culture have changed significantly in the last century. Teachers play an important role in enacting these reforms as they interpret policy and negotiate the realities of implementation at the school and classroom level (Braun et al., 2010). In many contexts, it is presumed that curriculum practice can be led by national policy (Priestly & Philippou, 2018), and this has led to a focus of reform efforts on curriculum delivery, with teachers being directed to make changes to practice which align with reform intentions, with little regard to their knowledge, skills and dispositions. In some contexts, there has been a recent emphasis on teachers as agents of change and developers of curriculum in their own right (Biesta at al., 2015). In this paper, we seek to emphasise the important role teachers have in enacting curriculum and mediating educational change by mapping teachers’ knowledge, skills, and dispositions as reported in studies of large-scale curriculum reform.

Results demonstrate that knowledge and understanding of reform requirements and intentions were empowering factors that promoted uptake of the new curriculum. Subject-specific content knowledge was important for teachers to understand the value of new content and to provide sufficient time in their programs for its rich delivery. Through ongoing, collaborative professional learning, teachers can develop new content knowledge and become more confident in enacting it in their classrooms. Given that many of the reforms reported involved changes in approaches to teaching and learning and in the roles of teachers and students within the classroom, pedagogical knowledge was needed to understand the true intentions of the reforms. Commonly, a lack of knowledge and understanding of student-centred pedagogies hinders teachers’ enactment of reform intentions in classrooms, leading to shallow or mistaken applications that hinder true reform.

Closely connected with these types of teacher knowledge were the skills to enact reforms. Pedagogical skills were the most frequently described in the literature and were presented as either supporting or hindering the implementation of curriculum with fidelity. This language about teacher skills and the way they are evaluated in the literature perpetuated the view that teachers’ skills were in deficit and thus the cause of failed reform. Teachers were reported in the literature to lack a range of skills, including skills to employ experiential learning approaches, co-operative and discovery learning methods, inquiry-based learning, and skills-based teaching methods. This lack of skill led teachers to rely on familiar resources and teaching practices, with which they were confident in delivering the content. Skills could be developed to implement these new pedagogies through long-term, collaborative professional learning opportunities.

Prior success with earlier curriculum iterations tended to shape firm beliefs about teaching and learning, which acted as filters through which teachers’ beliefs about curriculum reform and enactment were perceived. For many, this meant a lack of genuine engagement with reforms and resistance to reforms that conflicted with their beliefs. For others, where reforms aligned with beliefs, reforms were taken up with enthusiasm. Additionally, teachers’ beliefs and dispositions provided insight, beyond the teacher-deficit perspective, into the challenges they faced in implementing reforms in their classrooms. Teachers reported many barriers to reform enactment on the ground included: large class sizes, limited time allocation, time needed to prepare, set up, pack up, and manage the additional resources needed in lessons aligned with reforms, lack of parent support, student reluctance to participate, student ability to engage, and preparation for high-stakes testing.

Our emphasis on teacher knowledge, skills, and dispositions reflects an evolution of thinking about the nature of teachers’ work. Shulman (1987) theorised teacher knowledge in seven categories: content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, knowledge of how students learn, curriculum knowledge, knowledge of the educational context, and knowledge of the values and purposes of education. Building on this foundation, Ball et al. (2008) theorised that this nexus of knowledge is augmented by a reliance on skills, habits of mind, sensibilities and judgements. Beswick and Goos (2018) proposed that a depiction of teacher knowledge is incomplete without the inclusion of confidence, beliefs and skills, which are shaped by context and situated relationally in enactment practices. To understand teacher enactment of large-scale curriculum reform, we conducted a scoping review focusing on teacher knowledge, skills and dispositions in this context. We reviewed relevant peer-reviewed journal articles between 2013 and 2023 and synthesised them using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines (Moher et al., 2009). Keywords were used to search three databases (ProQuest, Scopus and Web of Science) in December 2023. No restrictions were placed on study design; quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method studies were all included in the review. After screening the 1346 identified, 48 studies were included for review and were conducted in Algeria, Australia, Belgium, Bhutan, Canada, China, Cyprus, Denmark, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Mongolia, Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Turkiye, the UK, and Vietnam. A synthesis of the 48 articles selected for inclusion was conducted. Using a combined deductive-inductive coding strategy, we ensured that the study remained theoretically grounded while also responsive to patterns and insights from the literature. The codes, teacher knowledge, skills and dispositions were identified prior to commencing the synthesis and formed the conceptual framework of the study. These categories were expanded as themes emerged. First, two authors coded 10 articles; a third author read the 10 articles and validated the established coding. The original two authors read the remaining articles and coded them, noting key points and quotes relevant to these codes on a spreadsheet. From this spreadsheet, themes and subthemes emerged. In this paper, we grouped teacher knowledge, skills, and dispositions because they are directly linked to teachers’ professional capacities and serve as the theoretical lens for understanding curriculum enactment.

Our scoping review highlighted the centrality of teachers in the enactment of large-scale curriculum reform. Curriculum reform enactment draws on a broad range of teacher knowledge, including knowledge of reform requirements and intentions, subject-specific content, pedagogical knowledge, prior content knowledge, and prior knowledge of teaching and school contexts. Successful curriculum reform is dependent on a range of teacher skills relating to contemporary pedagogies, lesson design, scaffolding student understanding, and use of alternate assessment methods. Sustained educational change depends on teachers’ dispositions, reflecting the need for teachers to feel respected, valued, and included in curriculum making. Teacher knowledge, skills and dispositions have the potential to both drive and impede educational change. Meaningful engagement with teachers in curriculum design and ‘rollout’ as well as parental and system support for teachers, fostered positive dispositions towards reform and this in turn contributed to successful enactment. Despite this finding on the importance of teachers in curriculum enactment and educational change, we noted a tendency in this literature to frame teachers’ knowledge and skills in deficit terms and to view their role as subject to policy. When viewed as the targets of policy change, rather than makers of curriculum, teachers’ potential in educational improvement has been stunted; their practice hampered by miscommunication, and expectations that are incongruent with the context in which they enact curriculum and support student learning. Our study emphasises the importance of understanding the true value and function of teachers’ roles within educational change. The success of educational reform depends on recognising teachers' importance. They should be empowered as key policy actors in a complex ecology of curriculum making (Priestley et al., 2021). This means that teacher disposition can work in tandem with their knowledge and skills (Beswick & Goos, 2018; Priestley et al., 2021) to support positive educational change in classrooms.

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