This is the final report for the research project Curriculum Implementation Exploratory Studies Phase 2 (CIES 2). Over two phases and three years the CIES project has developed an analytical account of the various ways in which innovative schools and individual teachers have been working to implement the revised New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007).
CIES 1 employed case studies as the main methodology (Cowie et al., 2009). CIES 2 continued the case studies with nine schools from CIES 1, and added a case study of a low-decile, rural, full primary school. CIES 2 also involved “mediated conversations” with two groups of school leaders (Auckland, Christchurch) and two groups of teachers (secondary in Auckland, primary in Wellington). For these conversations, participants came prepared to talk to three or four other participants and a researcher for around 15 minutes. They introduced and discussed an artefact generated through or representative of their curriculum implementation practice. Subsequent to these short sessions the MOE research questions were introduced and discussed. During CIES 2 we also reviewed existing research about community involvement to produce a short synthesis (Bull, n.d.). After conducting separate analyses of the case studies and the mediated conversations we merged the overall findings to produce this final synthesis. The report also takes account of key findings from CIES 1 (Cowie et al., 2009) to document the implementation of The New Zealand Curriculum across all three years of the project.