The multiplication of regulatory activities, actors, networks and constellations in the education policy sector, at both the national and transnational level, have changed the premises for national curriculum-making (Anderson-Levitt 2008). The policy exchange concerns crucial questions such as schooling for social cohesion and multicultural citizenship, for a sustainable future, for enterprise and innovation and critical literacy including digital literacy. The arguments for restructuring the curriculum and including future key competencies have stressed that in order to achieve technological progress, economic growth and social wellbeing there is a need for a mix of highly specialised and generic skills (Rychen & Salganik 2001). In this context, the European Commission wants the key competencies to be made more visible in the national school curriculum (European Commission 2007). Due to a rapid expansion of testing and standardized comparisons of high stakes outcomes there have been a shift in curriculum discourses from subject-specific to generic curriculum criteria and to an increased focus on learning outcomes (Sundberg & Wahlström 2012).

Many European countries are facing increased performance pressures in raising curriculum standards and achievements. Sweden is one such example where the results and outcomes constitute the underlying principle for the new curriculum’s structure, with a close alignment between purpose, content, results and assessment (Swedish National Agency for Education 2011). Generally, a standards-based curriculum means there are clear expectations on students and their knowledge acquirement, that an assessment system that oversees their knowledge acquirement can be offered, and that this assessment is centrally regulated. It also means that the responsibility for education and student learning is decentralised to a local level, and that teachers and schools can be held responsible for deficits in student performance. Recent curriculum research suggests that standards-based and results-driven curricula have far-reaching consequences for education at large, including teaching and assessment practices. It is therefore crucial to explore this relation further. But although there is much research on student learning in the classroom environment, we do not know very much about how the curriculum content (as key competencies) and standardized curriculum requirements affect teachers their teaching.

More specifically, in this paper, teachers’ content theories when they transform curriculum content to actual curriculum events in classrooms are in focus. Based on a theory of teaching as curriculum events (Doyle 1992) and a theory of different versions and repertoires of teaching (Alexander 2001) the paper elaborates a theoretical framework for describing, comparing and explaining curriculum events in classroom settings. The analysis specifically pay attention to the following three repertoires (Alexander 2008): organizing interaction (i.e. whole class teaching, group work, one-to-one activity), teaching talk (i.e. rote, recitation, instruction/exposition, discussion and dialogue), and learning talk (i.e. to narrate, explain, instruct, ask questions, receive answers, analyze and solve problems, imagine, explore and evaluate ideas, discuss, argue and reason, negotiate) and how they are recontextualised, or played, out in classroom communiation.

The aim of this research paper is, by using the recent Swedish curriculum reform, Lgr 11 as a case, to highlight, describe, analyse and develop concepts for understanding and explaining relations between (trans-) national curriculum standards at one hand and its curriculum configurations in classroom practice on the other. In this paper our research questions are the following:

- What organizational repertoires do teachers think are most in line with current policy and how does it differ between different school subjects?

- What implications of standards-based curriculum reform can be distinguished in terms of pedagogical communicative repertoires, conceptualized as teaching talk and learning talk, by drawing on comparative classroom methodology? (580)