The One with the Curriculum.

One of the best things to come out of schools temporarily closing (I always try to find a positive where I can) is the amount of time I have to indulge in some serious CPD. I’ll confess that I do not have any children and I am grateful to have the time to do research and read a lot of books.

A couple of weeks ago ‘Lit Drive’ (If you’re an English teacher and haven’t yet heard of Lit Drive – get yourself signed up, immediately https://litdrive.org.uk/) announced they would be running a series of free remote CPD sessions on a Saturday morning. This week was the turn of Lit Drive founder Kat Howard who’s session would focus on curriculum design. I metaphorically pounced on that session.

When I became second in our English Department in September I knew that our curriculum was something I wanted to focus on, something I felt we could stretch, adapt and evolve but I’m still learning and so I did what anyone who is learning something new should do, turned to research, books and people who know a lot more then me!

I found Kat’s session one of the most useful pieces of CPD I have taken part in for a long time, it made me realise some things about myself as a teacher but also consider the idea that the curriculum is something that is constantly changing and that is how it should be. I wanted to outline my 3 key ‘Takeaways’ from the session.

1. ‘Oh, but the kids love it and I love teaching it.’ – We’ve all either said it or heard it. There are some novels, plays and poems I adore and have spent years building up resources for. I know that planning those lessons, for that text will take me less time because I have a mountain of good stuff but realistically, if we step back and look at ‘The Big Picture’, does that text logically fit into our curriculum? When you look at it alongside the other content how does it compliment pupils learning in year 8, year 9? Can pupils transfer the knowledge they’ll learn from reading say ‘Private Peaceful’ in year 7 through to year 8 and so on? Just because we love something and we have a lot of copies in the cupboard doesn’t mean it’s a good fit for the curriculum.
2. Sharing is Caring: Collaborative Planning – I am a control freak, I know it and so does everyone who knows me well. I am very much in the mind of ‘I’ll do it and then I know it’s done’ so when Kat made the point that English departments are teams not just one person it really stuck with me. It’s something I need to remember more often. I remember Anna Hunt (@ReynardannaAnna) saying to me ‘Everyone in your team is an expert at something. Help each other.’ And this is exactly what Kat says about the curriculum, it’s everyone’s job, get everyone involved. For example I feel very confident with ‘A View from the Bridge’ so I may plan a SOW on that but my knowledge of Gothic texts isn’t great so someone else in the team would be better off planning that. Play to your team’s strengths. That way the whole team can take ownership of the curriculum and everyone’s expertise can be drawn on. One thing that I think is really important though, and Kat mentioned this in the session, is that there is a clear and agreed standard that the SOWs all have to meet to ensure consistency across classes. Perhaps agreeing a basic template for lessons as a team would be a good place to start and making sure that lesson plans, designs, PowerPoints, however you choose to plan them are ‘quality assured’ by at least 2 members of the team.
3. GCSE at KS3: How to Assess – I include this as my final ‘takeaway’ purely because I’m not yet sure about it myself. Currently at KS3 we set ‘exam style’ questions as the ‘End of Unit’ assessment across our KS3. It makes sense to me, that whilst I’m not keen on turning KS3 into KS4 we include essay writing as formative assessments, I want to make sure that pupils can write fluently and confidently in preparation for the kind of lengthy writing tasks they face at KS4 BUT I don’t think this is perfect. I don’t think it necessarily provides pupils the opportunity to draw on the knowledge they’ve acquired (including that of previous years) and I think some pupils get overwhelmed when faced with the prospect of writing solidly for 40 minutes and proceed to forget everything they’ve learned over the last 6 weeks. A while back I read a blog that (I think!) might be have been written by Ben Newmark (@bennewmark), apologies if not, about year 7s writing essays in History, and how writing long essays actually results in repeated errors and stressed students, suggesting that actually, if we slowed down; taught pupils how to craft, edit and rewrite a paragraph at a time this would show much greater improvements in pupils essay writing. Making my end of unit assessment theory completely redundant, haha.

So, assessment at KS3 remains very much a focus for me, I think Kat mentioned in the session that she is still thinking about it and considering it herself. For now I ask myself, do KS3 really need exam style questions?

Thank you to Kat for the session and for letting me blog about it and my apologies to Ben if I have either misquoted you or that wasn’t your blog I read – but I’m almost certain it was. And thank you for reading, if you’ve made it this far!

The link to Kat’s session on her own blog can be found here: https://saysmiss.wordpress.com/downloadable-workshops/