Teachers are expected to implement curriculum, by using the specified guidelines and resources, to ensure fidelity and thus effectiveness. Evidence, however, points at high-stakes external assessment as driving this process, and also becoming a major barrier to the curriculum and its implementation. The purpose of the study was to develop an understanding of why teachers are reluctant in using these guidelines and resources, and instead allow their classroom practices to be driven by high-stakes external assessments. Utilising the experiences of some Senior High School Social Studies teachers in Ghana, this paper employed a grounded theory analytic framework to build a theoretical model, which explains the constraining hold of high-stakes external assessment on teachers’ classroom practices. It also emerged from the study that the effective implementation of any novel and transformative curriculum depends on a corresponding change in the external assessment regime, to ensure congruity/balance among the components of curriculum implementation.
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