An Introduction to Curriculum Design

1. An Introduction to Curriculum Design

2. What are we teaching?

3. The curriculum - The DfE definition • ‘The school curriculum comprises all learning and other experiences that each school plans for its pupils. The National Curriculum forms one part of the school curriculum.’

4. Ofsted’s definition

5. Schools must

6. Statutory Requirements • To provide a curriculum which is balanced and broadly based and which: • Promotes the spiritual, moral, social, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils at the school and of society • Prepares them for opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of adult life • Maintained schools must teach the National Curriculum)

7. Academies • Other types of school like academies and private schools don’t have to follow the national curriculum. Academies must teach a broad and balanced curriculum including English, maths and science. They must also teach religious education.

8. RE • Schools have to teach RE but parents can withdraw their children for all or part of the lessons. • Local councils are responsible for deciding the RE syllabus, but faith schools and academies can set their own.

9. Daily worship • Both maintained schools and academies must also provide a daily act of collective worship that should be broadly Christian, unless the school has been granted a determination to conduct collective worship of another faith.

10. RSE (from 2020) • Relationship and sex education (RSE) is compulsory in secondary schools • In primary schools, relationship education is compulsory but sex education isn’t. Schools must have a policy on their position. • Parents can withdraw their children from sex education • https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/relationships-education-relationships-and-sex-education-rse-and-health-education

11. Relationships • Families and people who care for me • Caring friendships • Respectful relationships • Online relationships • Being safe

12. Health education (from 2020) • Mental wellbeing • Internet safety and harms • Physical health and fitness • Healthy eating • Drugs, alcohol and tobacco • Health and prevention • Basic first aid • Changing adolescent body

13. PSHE • Personal, social, health and economic education • All schools should make provision for this but it remains outside the curriculum • Can contain the SRE and health education previously mentioned

14. The triple curriculum

16. Who is the curriculum for?

17. The What • The curriculum should enable all young people to become: • Successful learners who enjoy learning, make progress and achieve • Confident individuals who are able to live safe, healthy and fulfilling lives • Responsible citizens who make a positive contribution to society

18. CASK

19. Examples • Knowledge – Name and locate the world’s seven continents and five oceans • Skills – Set up simple practical enquiries and fair tests • Concepts – Understanding why countries invade other countries • Attitudes – To persevere with a difficult problem

20. The importance of ‘progress’ • Children should make progress through every curriculum subject • The curriculum in the school should enable this to happen

21. The How - What a school decides • Teaching methods and pedagogy • Teaching content additional to the statutory curriculum • How the curriculum is organised and described, for example, as subjects, topics or themes • The distribution of the curriculum across each Key Stage • The daily timetable i.e. start and finish times of the day, breaks and lunch times

22. What a school decides • The teaching hours per week • The time allocated to each subject and the length of each lesson • The organisation of teaching groups e.g. by age, ability or otherwise • How the curriculum caters for inclusion and differentiation • Resources for learning • Assessment

23. Understanding Curriculum Design

24. The stages of curriculum design • Purpose • Principles • Entitlement • Content • Organisation • Teaching narrative • Assessment Can be used to plan a whole curriculum, a subject scheme of work or a topic

25. 1. What is the purpose? • What is the purpose of your subject/curriculum? • For future employment • For personal growth • To become skilled in this area • Cultural capital • To further society

26. 2. What are the principles? • Schools will generally have a single mission statement/vision and a set of aims • These should thread through everything they do

27. 4areas to develop in your curriculum Personalisation Engagement Deep learning Remembering

28. Personalisation - What do you want to create? • What are the most important qualities you want to develop in your children?

29. Purposeful Enjoyable Interactive Full of variety Collaborative Creative Surprising Relevant Challenging Investigational Cross-curricular Builds learning Encourages risk taking Caters for different learning styles Engagement

30. Deep Learning • Deep learning travels further along Bloom’s taxonomy, beyond just knowing and understanding content • It might also develop associated skills such as collaboration, critical thinking and problem solving.

32. What we remember

33. Episodic memory and context

34. Remembering the context not the learning

35. Semantic memories – flexible and transferable

37. The memory journey Daniel Willingham

38. A big difference • Working memory is fixed, limited and easily overloaded • Long term memory is almost unlimited

39. Pressure point 1 – Not reaching working memory • Remembering the context/ medium rather than the learning

40. Pressure point 2 – Dealing with cognitive load • “Our working memory is a high maintenance mechanism. Give it too little to play with and it begins to look for more interesting fodder. Give it to much to juggle and it’ll drop all the balls.” Pips McCrea • We can handle four new pieces of information at a time • We remember new thing more easily if they are taught step-by-step • Beware the ‘curse of knowledge’

41. Chunking • Linking new pieces of information together over time helps memory

42. Accessing the chunks • Chunks will be in the long term memory (prior knowledge) • The more you know the more you can chunk • We need to access them and link the new learning to them • This frees up working memory

45. Pressure point 3 – Retrieving from the long term memory • The retrieval effect – the more you search for a memory, the easier it becomes to find it • So, the less you access a piece of information the harder it becomes to find it • Therefore we need to allow time for practice and application • And we need them to ‘tussle’ with the remembering to make the memory stronger • We need to avoid re-teaching too quickly, letting the ‘tussle’ happen first

46. The retrieval effect is stronger if we allow a bit of forgetting to happen before getting children to retrieve • Because our memories get stronger once retrieved if we have had time to forget them

48. Managing cognitive load • Know exactly what you want them to remember • Keep this slim • Make sure they know what bits they need to remember • Avoid too much other stuff • Then...

49. Plan for the retrieval effect • Plan your curriculum in each subject so it builds over the year and the key stage • Plan opportunities for retrieval after something has been taught • And gradually build a web of knowledge

50. Use retrieval tasks • Use retrieval tasks at the start of lessons rather than just in the plenary • They could be ‘do now’ tasks, entry tickets, start of lesson plenaries or any other retrieval tasks