to be the drivers of modernisation in Kazakhstan. These schools had a new cur-
riculum, new assessment practices, new pedagogies, international teachers working
alongside local teachers, and the reform was undertaken in partnership with selected
international strategic partners, e.g. Cambridge International Examinations, the
CITO Pedagogical Measurements’Institution of the Netherlands and the Center for
Talented Youth of Johns Hopkins University, USA (cf. McLaughlin and
Ayubayeva 2015 ). The new curriculum was also being assessed and evaluated, and
in 2011 a plan was developed to introduce action research to the teachers in these
schools as part of the evaluation and development of the new curriculum and other
practices. The action research project began in 2015 and now involves 500 teachers.
So it is a fast paced reform drawing on international practice and the experience of
the 20 schools is now being‘translated’to the rest of the school system. There is a
big programme of continuing professional development through an organisation
called the Centres of Excellence and the in-service education programme focuses
upon the new pedagogy embedded in the curriculum. By the end of 2015, the
three-month Centres of Excellence courses that have focussed on ‘modern’
approaches to teaching and learning will have reached some 60,000 teachers. The
action research programme described in this chapter was located within these 20
schools of innovation, with links to the partner schools that were learning about the
practices in the innovative schools.
The other important aspect of this discussion is the cultural history of the schools
in Kazakhstan, since this so clearly affects the values, beliefs and past practices of
the current schooling and is so central to teacher learning as I have already dis-
cussed. On the 16 December 1991, Kazakhstan became the last Soviet state to be
granted independence. It had been part of the United Soviet Socialist Republics for
more than 70 years. Naturally some of the current achievements, practices and
beliefs are from the legacy of the Soviet era. These range from universal free
education, universal levels of primary education, an emphasis on the wider goals of
education in the form of‘vospitanie’or upbringing, adult literacy and gender parity,
to a highly centralised system of education where policy is centrally dictated and
state controlled, and with heavy reliance on textbooks and hierarchy. There were
collaborative practices amongst teachers in the soviet era but other practices have
become influential since independence. Thisfirst decade was labelled the‘post
socialist education reform package’(McLaughlin and Ayubayeva 2015 : 56) where
practices were adopted and implanted in the Kazakh system. This was not suc-
cessful and the teachers struggled to understand and implement the new proposals.
The schooling system along with the economic system struggled in the nineties.
The second decade saw a shift in strategy to the internal growth of new ideas and
hence the schools of innovation. This was a view of reform based on‘teachers’
involvement in the process of curriculum development, development of the
assessment system, and textbook writing (which was previously never the case) so
that there would be better adaptation and implementation, thus allowing teachers to
function as‘developers—implementers’...However, this is a huge intellectual and
588 C. McLaughlin