Research School Network: Recovery curriculum or just curriculum improvement? Jess Field shares her experience of leading a subject in the current situation

As a Head of Department, when I began considering the concept of a ​’recovery curriculum’ I kept returning to 2 things. Firstly, as acknowledged in the recent EEF report (1) and Bradford Research School blog (2), there were likely to be gaps in students’ knowledge when they returned to school – and potentially a wider gap between disadvantaged students and their peers. Secondly, what the students missed out on during lockdown, and what I firmly believe should always be our top priority, was quality first teaching.

So while acknowledging the existence of these gaps, my focus was not on changing things drastically, but on continuing what we know is good practice.

Identifying gaps

In planning how we moved forward, we needed to reflect on 3 things; how were we going to find out what the gaps in knowledge were?; how would we address them?; and how would we know we had been successful in doing so? These are questions we would always ask, but when we returned we felt that students needed time to reconnect with their school life before being hit with summative assessments and as any summative assessment can only sample the curriculum our focus was going to be on formative assessment to support responsive teaching. This would enable us to systematically identify gaps in the core knowledge from their previous learning.

We have recently done a lot of work on developing knowledge organisers using core questions to establish just what the core knowledge for each topic is. The knowledge organisers therefore provide us with a concise body of knowledge to assess upon. However, we still needed to prioritise the knowledge and identify the core, fundamental, threshold concepts that we would work on first.

Targeting gaps

This led us to develop a strategically mapped, spaced retrieval plan focusing on the use of formative assessment to identify gaps and then the use of thoughtfully devised ​‘retrieval for elaboration’ resources to uncover the depth of the gaps and begin to close them.

Formative assessment data is collected via the use of PLC’s and low stakes quizzes set as home learning using google classroom. Teachers then scrutinise the results and use this formative assessment data to inform the planning of their spaced retrieval ​‘Do Nows’ for the following week. This then provides another layer of formative assessment in the classroom as well as an opportunity for teachers to reteach where necessary with the aim of closing any gaps.

We have, for a long time, used retrieval based ​‘Do Nows’ but strategically mapping this out across the year, whilst also having a mechanism for responding to formative assessment data gathered both in lesson and via home learning, moves this model on. As does the step away from basic retrieval towards retrieval for elaboration and organisation. You can read about our approach to this in my next post.

I wholeheartedly believe that the developments we have implemented are just good curriculum planning. Our next step now is to plan how we will assess, in a more summative way later in the year, whether the gap has been closed or whether further recovery work needs to be done.

Jess Field is Director of Science at Dixons Allerton Academy, and Research Lead for Bradford Research School.

(1) https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/public/files/EEF_(2020)_‑_Impact_of_School_Closures_on_the_Attainment_Gap.pdf

(2) https://researchschool.org.uk/bradford/news/into-the-unknown/