Inspire Connect Engage Create
Curriculum
Set Your Compass: Share Your Direction
31 week ago
All too often we don’t co-construct our curriculum with the children in our class. What occurs is a complete lack of clarity about where, as a group of learners, we are heading. In fact the direction we are going in is all too often very much laid out for the learner – the route is set by the teacher and the outcomes are already known.
Curriculum planning in this vein doesn’t cater for the tangent or the divergent thinker- well it might entertain it briefly but will eventually settle back on the steady path to where we were always going.
Curricular of this ilk are not setup for serendipity. If I knew exactly the music that was going to be played on the radio all of the time, well in advance and had no control over it, I would miss out on those beautiful moments when you hear a wonderful track that hasn’t been played for ages and there you are in that completely unexpected moment savouring every note.
Much of this is to do with teacher control and the lack of willingness to let go of the reins and venture from the path a little. But it is also to do with a lack of ambition about what we plan, many models of curriculum, as well as units of work, are legacy systems:
A legacy system is an old method, technology, computer system, or application program that continues to be used, typically because it still functions for the users’ needs, even though newer technology or more efficient methods of performing a task are now available.
If the direction of a unit is already laid out, involving the learner in the direction is fruitless, for the learner at least, for no alteration can be made anyway.
In his book How Children Fail, John Holt reflected in 1958:
It has become clear over the year that these children see school almost entirely in terms of the day-to-day and hour-to-hour tasks that we impose on them. This is not at all the way the teacher thinks of it. The conscientious teacher thinks of himself as taking his students (at least part way) on a journey to some glorious destination, well worth the pains of the trip.
He continues to explain that he recognises a disconnect with what we as teachers perceive as a learning journey and how children truly see this. How many schools do you think could still be described in these terms?
At one of our partner schools in South London the pupils of Rosendale Primary School negotiate their learning. They have a clear direction and input into the course that is going to be set – not only that they have the ability to define how they get there. The pupil’s prior knowledge, skills, interests and passions are the starting point for much of the project learning that takes place.
With a vested interest the pupils at Rosendale have a much clearer understanding of the learning as a journey – they know what needs to be done and have made choices that help to define this and make it real and meaningful to them. It is not simply a set of tasks imposed on them by a legacy system.
Most of the time with these more open models we have to set our course into the unknown a little, we have to be willing to take the path less trodden.
When the teachers and Year 3 and 4 pupils of Thorney Close Primary School took on the challenge of running their own TEDx we didn’t know if we would be successful, there were a great deal of unknowns. At one point we didn’t have a venue because Take That were playing at the Stadium of Light!
With uncertainty often comes failure and we felt that for real and so did the children, but would they learn from it – absolutely!
Here are some reflections on the process by one of the teachers involved:
I learnt to trust the children and to let them go in the direction they want, trust that they’re going to make the right decisions with a little bit of guidance but not as much structure as we normally would give. So to sit back more and to listen more, and just ask the odd few questions – without waiting for that answer that the teacher wants to hear.
One of my favourite ways to describe this sense of a general direction, unclear and yet thoughtfully open, is the idea of a “fuzzy goal”. Taken from the opening to the wonderful book Gamestorming by Sunni Brown, David Gray and James Macanufo – a fuzzy goal can both describe our philosophical approach to change as well as the direction of a student led unit.
Like Columbus, in order to move toward an uncertain future, you need to set a course. But how do you set a course when the destination is unknown? This is where it becomes necessary to imagine a world; a future world that is diferent from our own. Somehow we need to imagine a world that we can’t really fully conceive yet—a world that we can see only dimly, as if through a fog.
Pic navigation (cc) by marfis75
I Don’t Have Time For Formative Assessment
106 months ago
Although a fairly narrow view on the barriers to implementing assessment for learning, the cross section of views shared on the Google Document have been excellent as a starting point for discussion.
The above Wordle is a helpful representation of those contributions. I have removed the following words from the visual: assessment, formative, teachers, learning and students in an effort to focus on the other language more readily used to describe the issues.
“Time” appears as a perceived barrier to quality formative assessment or assessment for learning – but is it really such an issue? Is curriculum time often shunted and pinched too readily? Do we not protect our curriculum time, and so time for reflection, fiercely enough from the other pressures in school?
Less Coverage; Deeper Learning
186 months ago
My own research and interest into the issues swirling around assessment in schools coincides with the new purpos/ed campaign. Below is another comment left on the Google Doc from which I am highlighting and instigating some further debate around the subject.
Teachers and leaders need to see this as a change in philosophy and pedagogy and that will take good cpd and leadership to embed. It is a shift in balance of teachers’ skills; requires planning which doesn’t depend on fixed SOW as has to flex and bend to meet the needs of young people, there can be no ‘one size fits all’. Also time has to given for reflection which means less ‘coverage’ but deeper learning.
this was commented on by another contributor:
reflection is especially important to give children the time to comment on how they feel about their learning; all too often the time given for plenary/reflection is painfully short. Also, reflection needs to be modelled and focussed to be effective…
An approach being unique to each individual school, even each class and child is something that must be baked into assessment for learning. This malleability must also be reflected in the curriculum that is being used as a foundation and also validated by senior staff in school. There must be a clear message that if assessment takes a curriculum or project into an unexpected direction it is ok, there must be space for the students to feel this and for the teacher to know it is OK.
All too often we are worried about “coverage”, and our supposed accountability to that, to ever venture from the well trodden path – but it is often on the edges where we find the most powerful learning opportunities.
One size will not fit all, as the contributor rightly points out and we all will face different challenges in the classes we work with – where there is a need for consistency is in the space provided to do it well.
The second comment touches on this point. Reflection is all to often an after-thought, nor is it actively taught, demonstrated and explicitly modelled. There needs to be more discussion about learning and the process we go through and this needs to be brought to the surface by the teacher.
Teachers and pupils alike need the space (from school leaders,from local authorities, from government) to adapt what they are doing to improve the learning process: the curriculum space to explore the edges; the timetable space to reflect on the process and the professional space to make judgements about where learning is heading.
Pic: Deep under
New Early Years Foundation Stage Framework Viewed as a Wordle
57 months ago
by tombarrett
in Curriculum
Thanks to Steve Philp for sharing this interpretation of the draft Early Years Foundation Stage Framework which will be implemented from September 2012 and until the end of this September is under public consultation.
I have a pretty close understanding of the EYFS after spending some time in that age group and getting through a county profile moderation. It is interesting to see the intention to slim the framework down. From the Department for Education
A new, slimmed down early years curriculum for 0-5-year-olds, more focused on making sure children start school ready and able to learn, will be introduced next year under changes set out today by Children’s Minister Sarah Teather.
Responding to the Tickell Review of the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), the new framework radically reduces the number of early learning goals from 69 to 17. It focuses on three prime areas of learning critical to making sure children develop healthily and happily. These areas form the foundations on which children can then master the basic literacy skills they need for school.
Steve’s Wordle interpretation cuts through the gloss and acts as a good simple look at the language used which does help for us to see the overall theme or language trend. At my previous school the headteacher got into the habit of running policies and other planning documents through a Wordle to quickly look at the main focus on the piece.
As Steve Philp points out with regard to the below image - Interesting that ‘children’ and ‘must’ are the two biggest words…
I am not so surprised “children” appears so large, but the word “must” feels a bit odd in this context, and seems largely out of place. I’d be really interested in your reactions and those of current early years teachers to the proposed changes and to the Wordle itself and what it implies about the language and phrasing contained within it – why not leave a comment.
Are Online Behaviours Affecting Reading Skills?
49 months ago
In my final weeks of school our class had our usual Tuesday afternoon guided reading session, where we get the opportunity to work on some reading text with a small group of children. One particular comment from a pupil has stuck in my mind, so I thought I would share some of my reflections with you.
Whilst exploring a text we came across a particular word that became the focus of our attention. Although the group had no problem reading and pronouncing it they didn’t know what it meant. I aimed to set the children off exploring the definition from the information we could acquire from the sentence and the text overall, we may have even cracked open a dictionary or two…
“We could just Google it!”
As you can see the comment from one of the group stuck in my mind for a number of reasons. Firstly it indicated to me how much web searching had become part of how these 9 and 10 years olds process the information they see in the world. The concept of search applies to so much around them and the need for a better understanding of how we instruct and guide our classes to filter what they find, has never been so more acute.
Equally the appropriateness of using different tools is a key part of navigating the learning landscape, indeed one of the most difficult aspects is helping young learners make better decisions regarding the tools they use.
Of course I was not surprised by this comment after all many of the children have Kindles and the latest model has a full Oxford English Dictionary available on it. The children simply have to move a cursor and the definition will be displayed on the screen at the bottom. I remember writing lists of words I didn’t know from texts during my English degree and finding out later.
The immediacy of information and indeed the expectation for it is all to clear. We expect results, definitions and answers faster nowadays and so do the children in our classes. The question is what are we doing about it?
Within the browser too you have access to dictionary tools to help when you are reading online. I use Google Chrome’s extension which allows you to double-click a word and a little pop-up dictionary definition appears. I use this loads – no more written lists of vocabulary for me!
Another reason the comment struck a chord with me is how the decision to Google a word comes ahead of trying to establsish meaning from reading skills, such as reading into the context and exploring the sentence further. Of course, this one comment should not be over played. However in my opinion it does hint at the ways children are thinking about processing the information, from reading material or otherwise, we work with everyday.
I am of course an advocate for the appropriate use of technology, where it can transform learning and add value – and in this instance it is not a “this skill replaces that skill” scenario but an opportunity to reflect on the ways we can enhance what we do and take advantage of ideas children have.
To answer my own question in the title, yes they are in a broadly positive way, but especially children in primary school or elementary need support and guidance to help them filter the information they search. They need contextualised examples and ongoing references to the ways we search and use information tools – I think this is a pivotal aspect of teaching and can only become more acute in the coming years.
