Getting the flavour of a subject over time
Well hello there and welcome to update #046!
Well, one reason is that we are more likely to make progress in learning if new material builds on what we have encountered before. And the same is true for pupils.
There’s been a lot of talk about sequencing and progression in recent years and it’s because of the insight that learning is cumulative, for the most part. In other words, knowledge expands as we encounter more of it. It makes sense really, doesn’t it?!
Research from Daniel Willingham and others has shown that the concepts and big ideas are helpful in learning a subject. The concepts are like ‘holding baskets’ which contain a lot of information – getting to grips with the concepts and big ideas makes learning new content easier. I’ve done a short session on the importance of concepts in the series ‘Helping pupils learn the curriculum’ (£/free trial)
When we are planning the curriculum, it’s helpful to have a bit of insight into the big picture and the rationale or purpose of a curriculum subject. To make things easier, all the purpose statements from the national curriculum subjects have been collated here.
We know that there’s a focus on sequencing and progression for pupils across a subject. It’s helpful to have this in mind when we are thinking about what to teach – why are we teaching this topic now and how does it relate to what pupils have learnt before and where might their learning go in the future?
It's important that we don’t get bogged down with this: it’s about having the headlines, rather than getting deep into the weeds. The aim is always to make things manageable and to have an overall picture and then hone into the detail when it comes to what we are planning to teach.
To help us get an oversight, we can use the ‘Five Steps’ into the curriculum: this is about getting some feel for what might have been taught in primary and in secondary.
Once we’ve taken a look at the overview, which gives the big picture and ambition for the subject, we can then read how one practitioner, for example in history goes about developing a rich challenging history curriculum in her context. The reason it’s helpful to hear what others are doing is that we can incorporate their ideas into our own work, adapt them or disagree with them! It’s always easier to do this from an actual example, rather than just from the theory.
The third step is to get some insight into how two secondary history specialists think about the subject in their contexts. Again, we can learn from their examples which helps to develop our own practice.
The fourth step is to take a look at how some primary colleagues think about their planning, for example in the primary subject networks for history. (£/free trial)
And the fifth and final step is to have a listen to, or watch what some secondary history colleagues have to say, for instance as they develop a rich curriculum for their students. (£/free trial)
These are some suggestions, hopefully helpful!
Until next time
Mary
PS
We’re starting the second cohort of the Leadership Lobby very soon and here’s a snippet of Andrew Morrish and me talking about hopeful schools!
More information here.