heart of heartlands lessons

June 21st to June 22nd 2018 marked the 9th annual Education Festival hosted at Wellington College. I had the opportunity, alongside other staff members, to attend and undertake some incredibly engaging and focused CPD sessions around areas of education such as time management, workload and assessment. My one key takeaway from all of the sessions that I attended, however, was that of building an effective curriculum.

At Heartlands we have a clear focus on planning with the end in mind throughout our entire curriculum set up - from year 7 all the way to the very last term in year 11. This is absolutely key for progression and moving students in the correct direction for examination, however is there more to a good curriculum than just this? In Christine Counsell’s session on curriculum, she focused on how to build an effective curriculum as well as how senior leadership manage and embed curriculum in schools. She outlined key issues with curriculum management, not least often a lack of understanding of what the curriculum should look like for different subjects. This obviously resonates the higher up management you go, as managing subject-specific elements of curriculum understanding and development cannot be expected when looking across the whole school. This is why it is important to manage the process of curriculum building and facilitate those within departments to understand how an effective curriculum can be put together.

Counsell then offered her key tips, many of which resonated with my own ideas of curriculum building and practise. Firstly, she said you need to have an understanding of whether what you are teaching is hierarchical or cumulative - some subjects require knowledge to progress on to another topic i.e. Maths and Science, whereas some build learning over time with areas of study coming together to build a full picture like in History or English. She stated these are not mutually exclusive, but are important to consider when shaping the curriculum. The other key focus of curriculum management is not being in isolation. That is to say, that as a department or curriculum leader, you should not be working on your curriculum as a single entity that runs alongside others, when there are so many key areas of overlap. Subjects can flourish and support learning through the use of other subjects. Using the example of the poem War Photographer by Carol Ann Duffy - a poem studied in English - Counsell showed how curricula could work together, linking the heavy theme of religious imagery in this poem to content being covered in such subjects as religious studies or History.

With departments working together on areas like this, you would not only make teaching content easier, but you create a sense of relatability and realism to what you teach. This provoked the question, what does the end in mind really mean? Do we plan to the exam more than planning our curriculum to what really matters, a rounded curriculum with the end in mind being the outcome of education when they have left school? In Finland, there have been shifts in some cases to topic-based curricula, where all subjects are used as a means to teach a specific topic - such as space - a method in which cross-curricular expertise is shared and delivers a rich and relatable series of teaching episodes. In my planning of a new curriculum - Classics - I have already started to take on board what Counsell well-advised, looking at how my curriculum could support English, History and Languages, and in turn how they could support mine with cross over content being discussed, planned and addressed together.

Curriculum should be treated as a carefully planned interweaved set of paths, not as a linear parallel set of paths going to an end point exam. We should all be thinking about what we can do - however senior we are in education, to enable students to follow a path that gets them to the best possible end in their educational journey.