I am now in my eighth year as a head of geography and it is a job that, despite being an exhausting challenge most of the time, still has the power to excite me.
One of my favourite parts of the role is curriculum design. I love sitting down on my own with a blank sheet of paper and thinking about all the things that we could be teaching in our wonderfully broad subject. The places I want to explore with my pupils, the themes I want to develop and, ultimately, the stories I want to tell.
I like thinking about how my department can continue to improve what we teach and how we teach it, how we can layer up lessons and take pupils on a journey that steadily builds on what came before and takes them to the not-yet-thought.
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It helps that I have an incredible team of teachers in my department who love their subject, and an incredible team of pupils who are curious about the world and want to learn more, but lately I have been wondering how much of the curriculum lives in my head and how much lives in the classroom. These thoughts stem from many, many evenings over the past year spent rolling dice and killing orcs.
One of the few good things to have come out of the past year for me has been rediscovering Dungeons and Dragons. This was a game I played throughout my teenage years and into my twenties before life, work and other interests overtook it.
Now it is back and for the past 12 months I have met with a group of friends, all fellow teachers, over Zoom and we have adventured into unknown lands and told strange stories together. And this has left me pondering how we approach curriculum.
You see, in our Dungeons and Dragons games, I am the dungeon master - the head of department in this tortuous analogy. My job is to set the scene and ask everyone else, the players, what they want to do.
Dungeons and dragons and curriculum design
“You enter a dark, musty crypt,” I might tell them. “Two figures shamble from the shadows, one wearing the holy symbol of the lost-god Taskat. What do you do?”
They then tell me what they want to do and we roll some dice and see if it works. Maybe they attack, maybe they try to run or talk or sieze the holy symbol. The options are only limited by our collective imagination. Or at least that is what I thought.
For there is another limitation. The options are limited by how well we all share an understanding of what is happening in the scenario presented. As the creator of this world, I know that the holy symbol is highly significant, but do they? I know that the worshippers of Taskat had a morbid fear of fire and would flee from its sight, but have I communicated that to the players at some point in the story so that they can make use of this knowledge?
When we are playing Dungeons and Dragons, we are not playing out one scenario, the mummies in the musty crypt, we are telling much longer, interconnected stories in which we build on what happened before and use what happens now to decide what should happen next. If they do X, then Y can naturally follow. But in this game you have no idea if they will do X, so you have to improvise, adapt and respond as things change in the moment.
Understanding your story
All of this can be a lot of work. Writing adventures, creating worlds and populating them with stories, quests and villainous plots takes countless hours. Great if you enjoy such things but we all have other demands on our time, and so you can buy in adventures and campaigns created by other people ready for you to use.
The problem is, as you haven’t created it yourself, it can be much harder to respond to what the players are doing. If they don’t find the wand of the archmage, how does that affect what happens later? If they kill the captain of the guard in the town, will that affect the story you have been given to tell?
Even if you buy an adventure to use, you still have to really understand how it all hangs together if you are going to use it effectively. The best of these adventures provide an open structure with various things that might happen as the story unfolds. The worst of them railroad people along a linear path towards a predetermined outcome, some sort of assessment in which they either win or lose.
A shared vision
So we come, via this winding road, back to the subject of curriculum. If we aren’t careful, we, as heads of department, can be like the dungeon master who has created a world that exists only in his head.
We might have a vision for how everything hangs together and connects up, but that is no use if it doesn’t happen in the place where this curriculum is enacted, the classroom with every other teacher.
What we then end up with is people ploughing on through a curriculum regardless of what their pupils are actually learning because the people teaching the curriculum don’t know what is critically important to what comes next and what isn’t.
We can end up with a curriculum that is little more than a huge list of lesson plans and resources that people work through as they head towards the final showdown, the assessment.
Building a backstory
So what can we do about this? How can we ensure that everyone has the same understanding of the curriculum?
Firstly, we can remember that the curriculum isn’t a document, it is what happens in the classroom. We all need to play a role in shaping it. When playing Dungeons and Dragons, I will ask the players to tell me about their characters. What is their backstory, what brings them on this adventure? What is their purpose? That then shapes the story.
Likewise with the curriculum, we need to talk as a team about what we want the purpose of a particular topic to be. Why are we teaching urban challenges? What do we all hope to achieve by teaching it? Can our different ideas come together in what we then teach? We need to create the story, the curriculum, together.
Secondly, we can make sure our own vision for how the curriculum hangs together is shared. When starting a game of Dungeons and Dragons, I’ll quickly recap what has happened before and highlight key events that will be significant in what is about to happen.
Likewise, when we are getting ready to teach the next topic in our curriculum, we can spend time in a department meeting discussing the links to previous topics and how they will shape what we are about to teach. Links that are crystal clear to me but may not be to the rest of the group.
Finally, we can make sure there is space in our curriculum to respond to what actually happens in the class. If the players snatch the holy symbol from the mummy and flee, something different needs to happen than if they killed them and searched the crypt.
Likewise, in the classroom, we need to be able to adapt what we are teaching based on formative assessment of what pupils have understood. We can’t just continue working through a booklet or a series of PowerPoints because that is what was given to us. We need to adjust as we go.
Like playing Dungeons and Dragons, school leadership, at any level, is a collegiate activity. If we try to impose a vision on a team of professionals, it will fail. The only solution is to make sure that the vision we have is not only shared but built up together as a team and is flexible enough to respond to what happens as the game, or the lesson, plays out.
Mark Enser is head of geography and research lead at Heathfield Community College. His new book, Powerful Geography, is out now. He tweets @EnserMark
This was originally published on 25 April 2021
