What is our (subject) story?

• What is your big storyline? Start by asking what do you want students to learn and then create effective narratives to keep them interested. Curriculums (e.g. MYP and DP) are, like boxed sets, extended narratives. Articulate your curriculum narrative as an extended journey designed to capture the students' engagement and interest. Just as the narrative ofa good box set keeps us engaged through the twists of the plot and the engagement of the characters so also can the skill of the teacher keep the student interested and engaged in the big ideas of their subject, bringing the various aspects to life. Make sure that the content is connected, directed and coherent.
• Do you recap well? One of the features of the box set is the hook 'Previously on...' TV dramas remind us of the story line - not just what happened in the last episode but also what happened earlier on in the series. So start lessons with a recap of the big storyline, of what they have already learnt. This helps create the curriculum narrative in the memory, so that it is not forgotten. Do not leave the checking of students' learning until summative assessments.
• What's next? The best storyline's leave us asking 'what happens next?' How can we structure the storyline of our subject so that students are left with cliffhangers and asking 'what's next?'
• Understanding complexity. Some of the best box sets have storylines than become increasingly complex and complicated. How well do we scaffold student learning so that they can deal with increasing complexity and can understand how 'the story' fits together? Are we giving appropriate support to all students so they know what is going on?
• If you enjoyed this you will really like ...Amazon are very good at making recommendations based on what the reader has chosen. What links do we consciously make and recommend between our subject and other disciplines?

How do we engage students in the big storyline of our subject so that it excites them and draws them in?

We can learn a lot from the designers of box sets that narrate stories as complex as Tolstoy to mass audiences.

"Anyone who has looked at pupils’ books cannot fail to have been struck by the seemingly random nature of the content of many of them. Science books are full of notes about experiments, with little evidence of the development of skills or attempts to build on prior knowledge; history and geography books jump from topic to topic; and English literature books are often characterised by less-than-dramatic leaps from Tom’s Midnight Garden to Of Mice and Men to Macbeth. One cannot help but wonder what pupils make of all this. To them, the curriculum must seem like wildly random sets of knowledge to be learned and then forgotten.(Richard Steward, Plot your lessons likethey're Game of Thrones, Tes, 3 August 2018)

So how do we make sure that our curriculum is not understood as a meaningless aggregate of things to be learnt and repeated in summative exams?