Research School Network: Does the curriculum make you twitch? Planning a curriculum through the lens of one core approach can make the unwieldy feel more manageable

Do you remember your essay assignments during teacher training? Perhaps just reading that sentence made you twitch involuntarily. I know mine were full of buzz words, terms I felt I should be using to display my impressive knowledge of the teaching craft. When I was training this meant a whole heap of ​‘differentiation’ and ​‘personalisation’ and even ​‘learning styles’ (boo, hiss!). I suspect many being written this year are mentioning a fair bit about ​‘metacognition’.

I’m not intending to devalue the importance of these buzz words (well, maybe with learning styles I am), rather just to highlight how I was guilty of using terms of which I hadn’t quite fully grasped the full meaning.

Then there’s the one word whose polysyllabic nature accurately reflects its complexity: ​‘curriculum’. It’s the word that looms over all those others because it is what we want pupils to learn and how we want them to learn it. It’s the word that definitely gave me the involuntary twitch as a subject leader, especially when followed by the word ​‘redesign’. Because really, how many of us feel qualified to undertake such a task? It felt too big, too unwieldy. Beyond my limits. It felt a bit like I was back writing those teacher training essays.

The ​‘c’ word is making headlines again on the back of Ofsted’s new inspection framework which was released last month for consultation. While it has rightly received a (generally) warm response, it might well be causing more involuntary twitches to start as schools rightly or wrongly start trying to ensure their curriculum is Ofsted ready. And if you’re trying to do this with just the framework for support it could be tricky as, inevitably with a document that needs to cover a lot of bases, the phrasing seems quite open: my suspicion is that there are quite a few people talking about ​‘intent, implementation and impact’ to match their language to Oftsed’s.

If you are wrestling with the curriculum questions, consider the following as elements that may be worthy of consideration:

§ Subject knowledge
§ Vocabulary
§ Formative and summative assessment
§ Wider knowledge (cultural capital)
§ Memory
§ Metacognition

This is by no means exhaustive, and while we will want all those elements in a successful curriculum, it can help to approach the initial planning of a curriculum through the lens of one or two aspects to make the process more manageable. It can help make the free-wheeling kite feel a little more securely tethered to the ground by one key concept or approach. Of course, we can feed in further elements after giving new curriculum ideas time to bed down into classroom practice.

Recently, 20 colleagues from Sheffield schools joined us for a day focused on memory. Using this as a hook for understanding the learning process can be an incredibly useful way of starting to think about what we are teaching and how we are teaching it – our curriculum. In fact, with all our training, even if we are not explicitly mentioning the ​‘c’ word it’s always there because it encompasses everything we need to do when in front of a classroom full of pupils. If we’re able to start thinking about curriculum through one concept it might make those involuntarily twitches subside…at least a little.

Further reading around the curriculum
2 blogs
David Didau – What is a broad and balanced curriculum
Alex Quigley – Threshold concepts

A paper
Lee Shulman – Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching

A book
Mary Myatt – The curriculum