This post, the third of three, details the process carried out to reform the curriculum upon taking up my Headship back in July 2018. Every school’s needs are different so it is important to set the process I carried out into context. The school I took over was judged as requires improvement in March 2017. Between then and my appointment, there was a time of leadership instability. Initial visits to the school revealed that there was a lack of any curriculum leadership – no subject overviews, no progression across the key stage and no shared understanding of how any subject should be taught.
In the first part of this series, I set out the thinking about the big picture of curriculum design and this can be summarised with three key insights:
- Subject leaders need to do the thinking themselves. The value is in leaders enacting the process and learning along the way, not in buying in a commercial curriculum that is not tailored the school’s needs.
- The curriculum is the progress model. If children are keeping pace with a curriculum that increases in complexity, then they are making progress.
- Clarify the desired outcome for each unit of work. With periodic outcomes in mind for each unit of work, it is far easier to set children up for success in producing purposeful high quality work.
In the second part of this series, I detailed the components of medium plans and explained the decision to write these for teachers to ease workload and to ensure that curriculum intent is enacted.
Strategic curriculum leadership
Phase 3: What has been learned?
Senior leaders and teachers need to know what children have learned because this is the only true measure of how effective a curriculum is. Some subjects are assessed more than others so for the purposes of this process, I’m referring to non core subjects that are not assessed in the same way as English and maths.
I’d go one step further in defining the success of a curriculum. We must focus on the children that are most disadvantaged in any cohort. If they are are not learning what we intend, then we’re not succeeding. The learning of these children is the real measure of how successful a school is.
I’m proposing a set of indicators that can be used to judge the effectiveness of a curriculum. These are not formal assessments but when looked at in conjunction with one another can give us an idea of the extent to which the curriculum has been learned.
Low stakes testing
Regular opportunities for children to recall what they have learned serves the purpose of signposting what they do and do not understand as well as reinforcing memories making use of the testing effect. These can take the form of a review of previous learning in each lesson, a multiple choice quiz dropped in at any point in the sequence of learning or a short answer quiz used in the same way. Cursory glances over children’s responses, particularly those of the most disadvantaged, will reveal what has been understood and what has been misunderstood.
Vocabulary check
If medium plans stipulate the key vocabulary that children are to learn in a unit of work, then checking children’s understanding of those words are asking children to use them in context is useful. A great way to do this can be in conversation with a sample of children, perhaps with their books in front of them, perhaps not.
Composite end task
The high quality piece of work that children produce as a result of the work done in that unit, although not independent, can nonetheless add to the bigger picture of what children do and do not understand. After all, if, despite the scaffolding and support, children still misrepresent key ideas, we know that they have not fully understood them.
Reading comprehension
If children have developed a good schema over a unit of work, then their general knowledge will have been broadened. Considering that most reading comprehension can arguable be a measure of knowledge of a subject, one option to judge how much children have understood is to provide some reading material around the topic that has been learned to see if they can answer a range of comprehension questions.
When?
Some of these indicators can be monitored during or at the end of a unit of work but if learning can be defined in a change in long term memory, perhaps we need to look at the indicators away from the point of teaching, for example in the weeks after a unit of work has been completed.
So what?
These possibilities can give leaders and teachers a good idea of what has been learned and what has not. The important part of this process though is what we then do with that information. If we do not act on the information gathered, there is no point gathering it in the first place. Plainly, if we have spent a chunk of curriculum time on teaching a particular unit of work and children have not understood it all, the rest of the carefully sequenced curriculum can fall down. Concepts that have not been remembered well can be interleaved into the reviews of previous learning during lessons in the next unit of work. However, if it is an understanding issue, a couple of lessons might need editing and reteaching, perhaps at the beginning of the next unit of work.
The other equally important action from judging the effectiveness of the curriculum is to adapt to make it more effective for the next cohort. If there is a pattern of children misunderstanding a particular component of a unit of work, then perhaps the way that component has been taught needs to be adapted. Leaders may even need to cut some of the content because too much had been planned, or add to the content if it came up short. The sequence may need to be altered after teachers find that a different way made more sense. Through the course of teaching the unit, teachers may have found better tasks, photos, sources, video clips than were originally included in the plans and so adapting the plan upon reviewing the extent to which children have learned the intent is crucial to give the next cohort an even better chance of learning and retaining what has been set out.
In summary, monitoring these indicators should result in the edition of future plans for that particular class as well as the plans to be used for children in the future.
MrNickHart 
Leave a comment