Flat packed curriculum – David Didau

“It is so easy to be mistaken – and to persist in currently being completely wrong – when the expenditures of being completely wrong are compensated by many others.”

Thomas Sowell

Why do we buy so considerably flat pack household furniture? Very first, it’s many periods more inexpensive than bespoke hand-manufactured furnishings, and second, it also will save us the not inconsiderable expense of owning to make it ourselves from scratch. It also permits to substitute outdated, unfashionable aged items handed down from our grandparents and implement our very own taste to the houses we reside in.

In utilizing the KS3 English curriculum we have designed at Ormiston Academies Rely on (see here for facts) we have uncovered the flat pack metaphor a handy one for outlining to departments and teachers what it is we intend them to do with it. Like IKEA, we have provided all the pieces essential to construct a chest of drawers or a wardrobe, and all instructors need to have to do is carefully study the directions, convey along their own metaphorical equivalents of a screwdriver and a hammer, and start out turning the uncooked products into lovely sequences of classes.

This is meant to be an antidote to the ‘plug and play’ method to English teaching characterised by Barbara Bleiman here:

Coming soon, to a school near you…
Interview:
Q: How well can you follow someone else's ppt?
Q: Are you good at marking quizzes someone else wrote?
Q: Can you teach something you've not thought through yourself?
Q: Can you forget what you loved about the way you were taught?

— Barbara Bleiman 🎓 Education is Conversation (@BarbaraBleiman) September 25, 2022

Formerly, I have argued towards the use of PowerPoint as a implies for implementing the curriculum and share some of Barbara’s issues at the way teachers are progressively anticipated to only produce a set of slides composed by anyone else. But, as has been elevated by numerous English trainer responding to Barbara, the alternate appears to be fairly bleak. My teaching career, which began in the late 1990s, was much from the halcyon idyll eulogised by some. My very first head of office gave me a duplicate of 101 Red Warm Starters and explained to me to educate regardless of what I fancied from the inventory cupboard. I experienced no clue what I was performing. Useless to say, the students I taught have been terribly allow down. Experienced another person been ready to give me a fully resourced, sequenced curriculum I’d have bitten their arms off. Rather, I labored into the wee hrs scheduling pointless activity driven classes which – I desperately hoped – would charm to my college students ample that they’d sit in their seats and cease making an attempt to stab just about every other with scissors. This was very long before lesson resources were being routinely uploaded on to the world-wide-web and my only choice was to cobble alongside one another wonky strategies of do the job myself or wing it. This was what my far more experienced colleagues appeared to do. They hardly ever seemed to generate nearly anything down and just emptied the contents of the minds into the lecture rooms, usually to mesmerising result. It rarely labored that way for me even though.

Sadly, it was not until eventually numerous many years later that I was lucky plenty of to operate in a division where by we labored collaboratively on techniques of get the job done which we experienced collectively agreed on. But even then, teachers would add their slides to the shared region for other lecturers to use or adapt as they saw in shape with quite very little being familiar with of what the function of the curriculum was.

When, in 2015, Ofsted revealed Important stage 3: the squandered decades? it was a fairly truthful critique of everything I’d professional. Decades 7 to 9 was an interminable keeping floor wherever children circled right up until they have been allowed to commence studying GCSE specs. No wonder so several faculties selected to annex Year 9 into Crucial Phase 4.

Our curriculum is – we hope – considerably much better than some scuffed center floor of worn out consensus. Alternatively, it usually takes the very best of the present and the past and presents teachers with every little thing they need to have to educate excellent, lively, remarkable classes that induct children into the great mysteries of language and literature. It took at group of 5 English direct practitioners hundreds of several hours to generate. Every single has then been piloted in at minimum just one of our colleges and feed-back taken in which there are kinks to iron out and improvements that require to be created. This iterate process by no means will make our curriculum great, but it has resulted in a quality of methods which couple of university-based teachers would be ready to match. The student anthologies and trainer guides we provide are mini masterpieces of structure, craft and believed.

We are thoroughly knowledgeable that what ever a central scheduling workforce may well conceive is generally mediated (from time to time awesomely, from time to time disastrously) by teachers. So, we have embraced this inevitably and presented lecturers with anything they will need to know and enable them to assemble it as they consider most correct for their pupils.

This is all some instructors have to have. But quite a few some others require assist putting into all into action. With this in mind, we arrive up with 5 core pedagogies which we’ve observed to be straightforward to set into apply and really efficient at serving to college students make meaning from their classes. These are:

• Couch to 5k producing – this sentence amount approach brings together ‘the deconstructed essay’ for analytical composing and ‘slow writing’ for imaginative and transactional composing. This contains plenty of stealth grammar educating, but it’s all in support of meaning. There are 9 deconstructed essay sentences and 30 artistic writing sentence types that are specified throughout KS3.
• Reading through fluency – a tactic not only for increasing students’ orthographic awareness but just one which also has an impression on comprehension. It includes plenty of oral analysis which builds up to performances of shorter sections of texts. It will make for some of the most exciting lessons I have at any time taught or seasoned and when it college students make it work, it’s electric! (See extra below.)
• Structured discussion – this is our oracy system which is also built to aid college students orally rehearse their strategies and as a result increase not only their capability to discussion but also to compose. (Here’s a weblog I wrote about this technique some several years ago.)
• Say it, Spell it, Know it – an approach to instructing matter terminology and subject matter vocabulary which does precisely what it says. It will involve a lot of enjoyable with etymology and morphology.
• Retrieval and hinge questions – we partnered with Carousel Finding out to make sure retrieval apply is rapidly, enjoyment and productive and motivate the use of mini white boards for hinge thoughts. I’ll produce a lot more on this at a afterwards date.

Most of our schools have adopted different approaches to lesson construction to which academics are intended to adhere and these 5 pedagogical strategies have to be flexible enough to be utilized with any lesson framework. Of study course, lecturers can pick not to use any or all of these core pedagogies, but when they’ve witnessed them in action, most teachers under no circumstances search again. And, similarly obviously, there are a lot of other substances to excellent English instructing – we motivate instructors to use whatever techniques they discover fulfilling and helpful – but these 5 provide a stable foundation for earning absolutely sure all the things else you could want to do is additional effective.

For these who have the time and skill to make a curriculum that is as good or far better than the one we have made, they are welcomes to adapt any of our resources or are equally welcome to dismiss them. But if you’re going to argue what English training must be and hark back again to a dropped world of little ones dancing fortunately by way of key gardens then you need to have to know that the previous wasn’t like for most of us. It was challenging and bleak and frustrating. Try out to bear in mind what it was like to be a new instructor, caught in the headlights of alien routines and sullen pupils and consider the probability that what you with all your a long time of producing skills may prefer is unlikely to function as properly for the normal ECT.

Maybe they’d reward from a higher excellent, flat packed curriculum.

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