Leading Subjects CPD
Researching Intent and Implementation with our Subject Leaders
IMPACT of December 21- September 22 actions
We have worked hard to take staff on a journey to understand the cycle of creating intent, implementation and measuring impact. The first sheet below shows the impact on staff confidence so far. SLT will be evaluating and moderating these judgements to ensure they are robust. The following sheets then show one mechanism for how we have driven the process in a co-created, research led and leading , shared approach to build awareness and responsibility for all subject leaders.
INTENT for our Curriculum
We have a range of competing aims for our curriculum that have required careful reflection and compromise to get the very best planned for our community:
The National Curriculum Coverage AND the desire to ensure learning is interest lead and linked to current affairs. [How much of our curriculum needs to be dictated by the National Curriculum. How much space is their for thematic concurrent connected learning?]
The desire to empower teachers to design their own curriculum AND the incredibly detailed and impressively constructed off the shelf Curriculum Schemes. [Does this lead to over supporting a teacher that can make them dependent on a complex scheme and fearful of stepping away from this scheme?]
The challenge of ensuring coverage, progress and sequencing of knowledge and skills across the school AND the freedom for teachers to choose curriculum elements of their own interests, children's interests, their own skill sets. [If this is the approach in Year 3, are Year 6 left with the coverage leftovers?]
SOLUTION - The best of both worlds:
We take the National Curriculum at its word:
"3.2 The national curriculum is just one element in the education of every child. There is time and space in the school day and in each week, term and year to range beyond the national curriculum specifications. The national curriculum provides an outline of core knowledge around which teachers can develop exciting and stimulating lessons to promote the development of pupils’ knowledge, understanding and skills as part of the wider school curriculum. "
This means we map out the core elements that must be covered ensuring that we also leave space for the elements of the 'Living Curriculum' that allow teachers and children to build on their own interests, current affairs and learning opportunities caught IN THE MOMENT.
See below for our mapped out journey and our developing Subject Leader Progress to date...
Mapping out the journey
SMT (Senior Management Team) spent time reflecting on how the wider Curriculum journey could be developed to support all subject leaders to be aware and take responsibility for their subject. Eight different versions of the SMT thinking are shared in the google form. These highlight the similarities of thinking and the differences in presentation of the team. The Curriculum Development Jamboard lead to a Google Sheet to help focus on the progress in each subject and where extra support and resources may be required. See below:
Curriculum Development 21-22
The journey and progress on the journey for all subjects: This document was created with staff to map out the journey of subject review and also the process of Intent review, development and implementation. A challenge was in analysing the previous subject curriculum maps whilst developing the new ones - An improvement would have been to have the analysis at the start as, visually, this is where it would usually sit. However, we began be developing a reviewing the new Intent - see sheets below) before we began analysis the previous model - all of this highlights the challenges of running one model whilst designing another. Within a school setting, we can't just shut up shop for a term!
Researching Impact Measuring for Subject Leadership Assessment
HOW DO YOU KNOW?
Identify National Curriculum Requirements: Vocabulary and Contexts
This document shows the review of the National Curriculum. We wanted to reduce the National Curriculum narrative to the critical vocabulary, processes and knowledge that needed to be taught. To deo this we created five universal areas of knowledge that fitted the words we were discovering (it wasn't always an exact fit. ) These words: Create, Reflect, Explore, Reason, Communicate and Empathise. We identified that all subjects have a vocabulary synonymous with these approaches and this helped us to rationalise our approach to subject curriculum mapping and design. As a final check for subjects, we then reviewed our subject curriculum aps to ensure they contained all of these critical National Curriculum areas. This ensures a statutory requirements have been reviewed, considered and checked by subject leaders.
How do you know? Has become the go to question when discussing our subjects and their impacts. This document was created with staff to consider the sources of evidence that may or may not give some indication of evidence for a judgement against the key areas identified in learning from Ofsted (that we agree with): Sequencing, Coverage, Expectations, Teaching Standards, GAPS, SEN. We identified these elements from Ofsted questions reported from recent inspections. these questions also became a subject leader review of where they are - could they answer these questions 'with evidence? See this document which shows the impact of the subject leader support over Dec 21-Sept 22 - There is still work to be done but all areas are improving and staff will revisit this cycle this year to further improve their evidence strength and understanding - an ongoing cycle of evaluation and improvement!
Supporting the evidence gathering and questioning of subject leaders:
Supporting staff to consider the approach they take and the questions they will ask on Learning Walks to build concurrency AND sharing these questioning approaches to model good practice and develop practice together: