A provocation: the link between curriculum resources and professional development
Well hello there and welcome to update #065!
I’ve been thinking about an underappreciated element of professional development. In general, CPD is provided through inset, staff meetings and department meetings and this is great. Through engaging with new ideas and research I am likely to improve my practice.
However, I think there is another underestimated way that I can get better as a teacher. And that is through the resources I use.
What got me thinking about this was looking at how it would be possible to teach evolution, through story, in the Year 6 programme of study for science. I have written about the significance of story to help our pupils and students know more, remember more and have the capacity to do more.
In the evolution example, I have a couple of options: I can either download information sheets and worksheets from the internet and work from these.
The problem with many worksheets is that they are poor quality: the visuals and images are often crude; the tone is sometimes patronising and they often don’t privilege high level vocabulary which is the gateway into the subject.
Or I could use Sabina Radeva’s ‘On the Origin of Species’. Sabina trained as a scientist and retrained as an artist. This is important, because I can have confidence that the material is going to be accurate, the artwork is superb and is going to provoke my pupils’ curiosity, the tone treats my class as though they are intelligent human beings.
It’s laden with beautiful vocabulary such as sediment, extinct, species, geological record, all of which are fertile gateways into understanding this element of the primary science curriculum.
So what has this got to do with my own professional subject knowledge development? Well, as I use the text, my own understanding and appreciation of the subject is likely to deepen as a result of teaching from accurate, scholarly and engaging material. This is less likely to happen when printing off a pile of worksheets and to give to my class.
Through using a high-quality text for my class, my own insights grow in a way that asking my pupils to read and fill in some blanks will not.
So while I make the case that high quality texts across the curriculum are what my pupils deserve, it’s also made me think that in using them I also get to know more, remember more and do more!
Until next time
Mary
PS The intro webinar for The Teachers’ Collection is now live.