Research School Network: Big Ideas that Shape our World

Curriculum development

Like many schools, we have been spending quite a lot of time and energy developing our curriculum, starting at year 7 and building our way upwards. It’s brilliant but also time-consuming, with a huge impact on workload and a significant ongoing need for professional development.

Underpinning this development are our Big Curriculum Ideas – organising principles that make each discipline distinctive, ideas which students come back to time and again. In English this includes metaphor, in science forcesand in geography place. These are not the totality of what is taught, but they give structure to the intended curriculum and enable clear progression models.

What are the Big Ideas that Shape our World?

Our curriculum also takes into consideration ideas that cross disciplinary lines and are inflected in subjects in different ways. We call these the Big Ideas that Shape our World. These historical ideas hold contemporary relevance and help our students understand how we are always in dialogue with the past. There are notions of love, femininity, heroism, abstraction, philanthropy and revolution, as well as movements like fascism and moments in time like the rise of popular theatre.

In total there are around 100 Big Ideas and they are organised into six epochs – classical, medieval, early modern, industrial, modern and postmodern. We have a huge timeline representing these periods in our main hall, with accompanying graphics representing some of the ideas within them. This gives us an overarching structure to make connections between subjects and help students see how what they are learning in lessons is part of an unfolding narrative of human history.

A good example of the power of having this underlying curriculum structure came in an assembly I delivered last year about Remembrance Sunday. The timeline enabled me to visually signpost some of the ways that the events of WW1 led to greater freedom for women and increased democratisation of society, both ideas the students had learnt about. We had a common language and frame of reference I could use to make links and set events in their historical context.

How do students learn about Big Ideas that Shape Our World?

Students study the Big Ideas that Shape Our World as part of their homework. Each week they read about a given idea, which is always framed around a symbolic or representative artefact, such as a painting, a sculpture, a book or a map. It’s a bit like the BBC and The British Museum’s project A History of the World in 100 Objects, where the object provides a way in to a different world and other ways of seeing and thinking.

The articles themselves are all written by our staff, so they are linked to our context and frames of reference. The artefact is the starting point for a brief historical overview of the idea in question and explanation of its contemporary importance. Students answer some short questions to check their understanding, but the main thrust of the homework is where students use a series of prompts to offer an extended reflection on what the idea means to them and their world.

We haven’t got everything right yet in terms of how we monitor, feedback and celebrate student achievement, but over the past couple of years we have seen some amazing responses from students. We plan to link this work to the development of oracy and dialectical thinking: to give students more opportunity to engage in their learning and relate it to the world around them.

Whilst the majority of our curriculum development is centred around subjects and the notion of Big Curriculum Ideas, we think there is real value in finding ways to make meaningful connections and look at other Big Ideas that Shape our World. As Kerr suggested, the notion of curriculum should denote ​‘all the learning which is planned or guided by the school’ whether within the primacy of subjects and disciplines or more holistically across the school through our homework programme.

Phil Stock