A great deal of work has gone into the curriculum intent. For the most part, intent statements are in place, plans written up, and resources prepared. Virtually every school talks about an ambitious curriculum for every young person.
Yet there is sometimes a gap between the the high aspirations and what lands on children’s desks. We need to pay attention to whether the promise is being delivered. Does our curriculum do what it says on the tin?
Here’s what can happen: the learning resources provided to pupils don’t always match up to the ambitious aspirations of the curriculum intent. This is never a blame game, it’s just we haven’t always made the connection that an ambitious promise deserves and an ambitious delivery.
There are three principles for implementing the curriculum that I think can help us here.
The first is, does it make pupils think? If they have completed a piece of work and yet are not able to say anything about it, have they really learnt anything? We can shift this quickly and instead of saying ‘Have you finished?’ we ask them ‘Tell me what you’ve learnt'.’
The second is to ask whether the activities and resources are likely to lead to mastery over time. In other words, are my pupils likely to be able to do something in a new context, at some point in the future, as a result of what I have taught them?
The third might sound odd! But the question I ask is whether the materials are beautiful? Not in the sense that they are covered in sparkly graphics, but in the way that William Morris talked about beauty. He said that we should have anything in our homes that we don’t know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. And so I ask myself, are these resources useful in terms of pupils’ learning and beautiful in terms of whether they are of high quality?
To take an example, if pupils are learning about the interior of a mosque in religious education, they can either fill in the gaps labelling the features on a poor-quality worksheet, or they can be shown examples of real mosques. It is this shift in terms of considering quality of implementation that can make all the difference.
We address this and other ways to embed a terrific curriculum for our pupils in the Huh Curriculum Leaders self-paced course.
Feedback from a colleague this week:
‘It’s completely transformed the way we think about curriculum planning and implementation!’
You can find out more here.
Until next time
Mary
PS In other news!
Being Your Best, Doing Your Best has been created by Dr Emma Kell for the Huh Academy. It’s a practical, research-based course with coaching tools for school staff to promote and enhance self-efficacy, success and job-satisfaction. We’ve done an webinar explaining what’s covered and the 8 session course starts 7 November.
And Finding My Voice is a brilliant new programme aimed at holistically developing young minds through robust oracy practices.
Don’t miss the Live Launch: Monday 16th Oct, 5:30 PM!