Teachers' Understandings and Practices about Curriculum Guidelines: Exploration of Colombian Curriculum Guidelines for Foreign Languages

Curriculum guidelines provide a framework to guide teaching, assessment and reflection on the curriculum and students' learning. Most of the time teachers seem to have a global understanding of the rationale behind curriculum guidelines, but when it comes to classroom teaching; do they put into practice what those guidelines recommend? This book presents a qualitative study carried out with five Colombian English teachers. The aim of the study was to explore public school teachers' understandings and practices about curriculum guidelines for foreign languages. These guidelines were a shared construction of teachers from different institutions in Colombia. The government recommends the document as a pedagogical orientation. In particular, the study examined how these guidelines oriented teachers' educational practices and how they were reflected in their classes. Data collected during this study was drawn from different sources: class observations, interviews, questionnaires and documentary analysis. The main findings indicate multiple aspects about the real teachers' practices in their classes and how they differed from what the government promoted in the curriculum guidelines.