Effective Papers For learning

Maintaining a Healthy Culture through Curriculum Reform Guidance for Middle Leaders DRAFT Context There is a trend in schools towards greater standardisation, particularly in relation to curriculum content. In practice, this might involve: Teachers delivering the same curriculum content in the same order Standardised formative and summative assessments Standardised resources, such as knowledge organisers and models Standardised homeworks Standardised classroom approaches and pedagogy There are a number of reasons why schools are choosing to develop in this way. These include: Reduction of teacher workload, and the reduplication of work across many teachers, in planning and creating resources Added coherence to CPD Increased ability for teachers to collaborate meaningfully together and share practice Overall higher quality and consistency of student experience over time Ability for subjects to cope with unexpected change, eg teachers leaving mid-year Improved potential for intervention ...

The below is a transcript of a talk given at NedTalks 'Creativity in Education' event, Winchester House School, June 2019. About 30 years ago, someone had a very good idea. It was designed to provide reliable access to clean water in rural South African villages. The invention was called a playpump; a roundabout which, when turned, drew water to the surface and stored it in a tank. Children played and had fun; precious water arrived - a quintessential win-win. Word spread, benefactors were attracted, it achieved an award from the World Bank, and after years of investment, by 2007, over 1000 had been installed. There was a hitch. More than a hitch actually. The problem was that in practice, they didn’t work very well. There were various reasons for this: children didn’t reliably play for the amount of time necessary to pump sufficient water - sometimes they’d come and just sit and chat, but not spin. Interestingly though, when evaluators arrived with cameras and clipboards to se...

There is a current trend in schools towards greater standardisation, particularly in relation to curriculum content. This might involve: Teachers delivering the same curriculum content in the same order Standardised formative and summative assessments Standardised resources, such as knowledge organisers and models Standardised homeworks Standardised classroom approaches and pedagogy There are a range of reasons why schools are choosing to develop in this way. These include: Reduction of teacher workload, and the reduplication of work across many teachers, in planning and creating resources Added coherence for CPD Increased ability for teachers to collaborate meaningfully together and share practice Overall higher quality and consistency of student experience over time Ability for subjects to cope with unexpected change, eg teachers leaving mid-year Improved potential for intervention and catch-up resources, meaning that schools are better able to help absent students to catch up Abili...

Effective modelling - by which I mean showing students how to write well - empowers by enabling application of knowledge,  articulacy, and the expression of complex ideas. It’s also deceptively complex, it seems to me, and therefore a highly-skilled element of classroom practice. Here is an outline for a possible way to go about it. Many of us are sceptical about highly-prescribed processes, because they can appear mechanistic and lack an appreciation of context. The below is of course only one strategy and many others are possible. My focus here is on using pre-prepared paragraph models, written in advance and shared with students in completed form. Live modelling has advantages but also limitations: I've often found that spontaneously writing a focused and clear model paragraph, whilst simultaneously managing a full classroom of teenagers, is tricky and can  easily result in  confusing writing. Pre-prepared models, however, can be precisely tailored and tweaked to ensur...

I recently took part in a CPD session with the fantastic English team at Kingsdown School in Swindon, which comprised a talk-through and discussion of how to teach an upcoming unit on teaching Macbeth to Year 10. I feel a little behind the curve on this as I know that other schools and MATs do this regularly, but I was struck by  how much more useful it felt than a lot of other training I've received or delivered over the years. The content of the session was this: - Introduction to the philosophy / principles behind the unit . This included elements such as: teach first, then question (not the other way around), knowledge leads to skill, be the expert in the room, do a limited range of core activities repeatedly (more on the approach is here if you are interested. - Talk through of the medium-term plan , which the head of English had prepared meticulously, including dates, assessment weeks, core knowledge. It was only a side and a half of A4, with no further paperwork, so simple e...

Highly-structured knowledge-rich teaching is sometimes accused of being joyless, and schools attempting to move in this direction ought to take this concern seriously. A hastily-introduced, top-down, Ofsted-inspired move to KR could easily result in sceptical teachers, unaligned with the approach and untrained in its nuance, delivering a poorly-designed, cobbled together mishmash of knowledge organisers, quizzes and tests. This would be bad for students and teachers, and could do lasting damage. So how should schools pursuing a knowledge-rich approach avoid this, and find joy? The following might be worth bearing in mind. Fun and joy are not the same thing. I'm fortunate to go to a lot of lessons, in a wide variety of schools. In lessons where there is an expectation of highly-structured teaching, the students are often either listening to the teacher, having focused pair-discussions, or working independently, usually in silence. There's not a whole lot of what might be describ...

To lay my curricular cards on the table, I believe that the promotion of a knowledge-rich approach to teaching is the best available option to us in order to bring about sustainable positive change. For me, this means that we should:          Write and implement clear, well-organised enacted, which specify and prioritise the teaching of knowledge to a greater degree than is currently typical          Ensure that this increased knowledge-base is used meaningfully, to inform and enable domain-specific achievements in critical thinking, reasoning, increasing independence of thought etc It means that we should broadly avoid:          Attempts to build curricula around the development of generic ‘skills’ which transfer across subject domains, such as resilience or creativity          Approaches which try to downplay the value of subject content because technology or assumed conditions in ‘th...