Why | How | What of curriculum design
Friday 14 June 2019
What informs curriculum design in your school?
Education is always about relationships, between teacher and content, content and student, and teacher and student. This is sometimes referred to as the didactic triangle. Education cannot exist without communication and relationships. The teacher is key."In just the same way as in training musicians or sports people a significant mentor is a necessary prerequisite." (Eyre, D. High performing learning 2016:26) "I learned to love learning because of Mrs. Duncan." (Oprah Winfrey)
Start with end in mind. It can be useful to metaphorically paint a picture of the ideal student you wish to graduate from your school and work back from there: cognitive learning (relating to ideas) | skill-based learning (relating to processes) | dispositional learning (a character type, a habituation to act in a specific way. Work out how you want pupils to be changed by the curriculum, and work your accountability measures back from there. What we know changes what we see. Keep an eye on the big picture for each child. "Too often schools start with big ideas such as 'creativity, critical thinking, or resilience' and then imagine that they've secured those things by plonking them all over the curriculum. This is curriculum as random sprinkling." (Christine Counsell). You have to be more deliberate in your choices than that. Each layer of knowledge needs to have a cumulative effect on what pupils can notice and do.
Establish a clear vision of what the curriculum is (Wayne Hugo provides an outline later in this page). Consider how you are going to frame the curriculum as (a) a series of subjects, or (b) a series of experiences you will immerse students in, or (c) processes, approaches and style, or (d) all and more. Putting each child at the heart consider the cross-curricular intentions you are trying to achieve. Know the aims and objectives of your curriculum | educational programme.
Design your framework: The curriculum should establish an inspiring framework for the teachers and students to act within. Educational goals and curriculum standards are important, but care needs to be taken that these standards to not develop into merely standardisation tools with their attendant standardised assessment guidelines and materials in order to ensure that pupils have reached the prescribed standards.
Keep a focus: strip away the irrelevant and focus on the important and relevant. Have a clearly articulated view of what success looks like. What evidence will you collect in order to review your curriculum offer and do you fully understand what "success" should look like?
Make it real:Subject matter is in the world - it is not what is in books. Curricula should encourage and provide opportunities for students to question and make sense of the world around them in all content areas. "The real world provides many entry points to any subject matter - different minds get engaged in different ways. Minds generate questions, and the questions become the curriculum. We (criticalexplorers.org) do not tell the students what we make of the materials we have them look at and study. They proceed as mathematicians, physicists, writers, historians do. We have them listen to each other, talk about what they make of these materials ..." (Eleanor Duckworth)
Put teachers at the centre of curriculum planning - this provides excellent professional development. By collaboratively sharing expertise and discussing principles behind curricula and assessments teachers are empowered to prioritise learning of every individual. Additionally, such collaborative activity ensures there is a shared vision.
With these principles in mind we will try and explore three questions:
- The WHY? Why do we teach what we teach?
- The HOW? Which pedagogies should inform our practice as teachers?
- The WHAT? How do you choose what to teach?
Links: Getting the curriculum right | Cambridge | Designing your own curriculum
How should we teach? What pedagogies should inform our practice as teachers?
"Stipulating the knowledge content of the curriculum is not enough. You also need an equivalent emphasis on the pedagogy of teachers, and the process through which students produce knowledge. If pedagogy is forgotten, any curriculum can lead to memorisation rather than understanding." (Professor Michael Young, UCL, Tes 17|5|2019)
Two lines of inquiry should inform our answer to this question: (a) what do we know about specific pedagogies that make them effective? and (b) are there specific pedagogies for each academic discipline?
Effective pedagogies
What do we mean by effective? One way of speaking about effectiveness is to use the term 'mastery': how do we ensure that students secure deep understanding of concepts at the heart of each area of knowledge and fluency in applying them? Such pedagogies secure mastery, coherent connections and remembering, alongside rich experiences, engagement and authentic purposes with relevance to the world in which we live.
A literature review advanced the following 9 strong claims about the characteristics of highly successful pedagogies. These claims provide a good checklist to review subject specific pedagogies. Effective pedagogies:
- Give serious consideration to pupil voice.
- Depend on behaviour (what teachers do), knowledge and understanding (what teachers know) and beliefs (why teachers act as they do).
- Involve clear thinking about longer term learning outcomes as well as short-term goals.
- Build on pupils’ prior learning and experience.
- Involve scaffolding pupil learning.
- Involve a range of techniques, including whole-class and structured group work, guided learning and individual activity.
- Focus on developing higher order thinking and meta-cognition, and make good use of dialogue and questioning in order to do so.
- Embed assessment for learning.
- Are inclusive and take the diverse needs of a range of learners, as well as matters of student equity, into account.
Subject pedagogies
Each academic discipline has its own signature pedagogy. Signature pedagogies refer to the approaches to teaching and learning which are most conducive to cultivating particular capabilities. Signature pedagogies may also be a helpful way of thinking about interdisciplinary teaching and learning. If students are helped to put on the hat of a mathematician | economist | historian | scientist etc they can ask how would a subject specialist think, perform and act with integrity if they were to approach a particular task | problem?
Learning mastery: "Expertise development may be defined in layman's terms as not just covering the curriculum but developing the habits and behaviours assoociated with expertise in a given domain. For example, thinking and approaching tasks like a mathematician or a historian rather than just doing the maths or a history course....These are skills that signify growing expertise in the subject and students find it very enjoyable to be apprentices on the roasd to becoming experts rather than merely 'covering the curriculum'." (Eyre, D., High performance learning, 2016:33-34)
See: Signature pedagogies: Questions that should be at the heart of each subject
"All teachers face a pedagogic problem in enabling their pupils to transform the knowledge they bring to school by engaging with the subject knowledge within the curriculum. The transformation is not just a mechanical process of transmission but also a social one, and one that for some pupils will bring problems of identity that they will only overcome if the teacher has earned their trust."(Professor Michael Young, UCL, Tes 17|5|2019)
Have an overarching pedagogy across the school
An example of this is high performance learning. High performance learning provides a model for achieving high levels of academic performance for all students and all schools. It avoids labelling students as 'less able' or 'more able', but instead sees high academic performance as learnable and focuses on unleashing the learning ability we all possess and systematically developing it into an advanced form.
High performance learning is a curriculum-led approach. It takes what is known about how people reach advanced cognitive performance and translates it into a framework which teaches students how to develop greater intelligence. At the heart of the framework are the 20 Advanced Cognitive Performance characteristics - defining the ways of thinking a student needs to develop (e.g. meta-thinking | linking | analyzing | creating | realising) - and the 10 Values, Attitudes and Attributes - defining the ways of behaving that the learner needs to acquire (e.g. empathetic | agile | hardworking). It is encouraged that these two core sets of characteristics become so much a part of the way the school operates that they become the language of the school used by students as well as staff and parents. Both sets of characteristics are important for success.
"Academic success is not defined merely as the ability to pass the test. World class schools are not test-passing factories. They focus on a more creative rounded view of learning, emphasizing the rewards of deep understanding and mastery of the subject. They are developing learner capability and nurturing a love of learning and its challenges. This implies the development of autonomy and confidence in the learner as well as the motivation to succeed. They develop not only academic competence but also the values, attitudes and attributes that will serve them well in university, the workplace and their life." (Eyre, D. High performance learning, 2016:7)
Click HERE to sign up for free resources that provide you with details of the framework, and HERE to buy a copy of the book explaining the framework.