Curriculum planning can look very different from school to school.
For some, it’s a collaborative effort, in which teachers from the same department come together to create centralised schemes of work. Others source ready-made curriculums from external organisations. And of course, there are those who prefer to allow teachers to plan independently, tailoring their approach to the individual needs of the students in their class.
But which approach works best? Here, three educators share their views.
More teaching and learning:
Collaboration is key
James Perry is the assistant headteacher at Saltash Community School. He says:
Like many areas of education, collaborative planning has been widely interpreted to mean different things in different schools. With no single definition, it is understandable why this has occurred. Personally, I think collaborative planning is the key to an effective curriculum.
One of the strengths of the teaching profession is the individual creativity teachers bring to their own classrooms; some fear a set of centrally planned PowerPoint presentations will lead to them becoming no more than a mouthpiece for a PDF. This is not collaborative planning. True collaborative planning involves the whole team deciding where to be tight and where to be loose.
It is helpful to be tight when planning the delivery of key words, definitions, processes, diagrams, explanations and facts, ensuring that every student receives the same key information. However, planning can be loose when it comes to deliberate-practice activities. Teachers should be empowered to design activities they know will work for their individual classes, adapting and using their professional judgement and creativity.
Great minds think together, not apart. Delegating units of work to different teachers isn’t collaborative planning. Collaborative planning means teachers sitting around a table together, deciding what to teach, agreeing on key words, definitions, explanations, diagrams, etc and sharing effective methods for doing this while planning lessons together. This not only creates ownership of all lessons by all teachers but increases the skills and confidence of the whole department as they draw on each other’s strengths. As a result, students receive teaching from a department where every teacher has mastered that lesson.
Just because we deliver lessons independently does not mean we should plan them independently. Collaborative planning will not save time by reducing workload because all teachers should be involved in the designing of the lessons. However, by working together on lessons, the outcome of the time is significantly better than spending that time alone. We could all sit in our own rooms, working independently on the same lessons, or we could do it together to much greater effect.
Ditch the externally designed curriculum
Edward Sealey is a head of English in Manchester. He says:
I am naturally sympathetic towards the decision many English departments now make to adopt an externally designed curriculum. Such a decision reduces the workload, brings stability and continuity, and helps to develop the subject knowledge of less experienced teachers.
There are undoubtedly benefits. At what cost, though?
It would be difficult to find an English teacher who didn’t want to broaden students’ horizons, deepen their understanding of complex issues, empathise with a diverse array of people and perspectives, and reflect on their own lives and experiences.
To achieve any of this, we must consider the unique backgrounds of our students. To teach students across the country, irrespective of their background, the same texts would be to miss the point of our subject entirely.
This is not to mention the myriad problems you will encounter when trying to implement a curriculum designed by someone else located far afield. It also can have a demoralising impact on your team; placing them as custodians of a curriculum, rather than its co-architects.
This belief led me, not long after arriving as head of my current faculty, to make the difficult decision to ditch our previous curriculum, one that had been brought in from elsewhere.
As a team, we designed an English curriculum for the students. We selected challenging and enriching texts, topics that covered new ideas and viewpoints. We ensured students would explore issues relevant to their day-to-day lives, while also helping them address gaps in their cultural capital.
It was a challenging undertaking, but as a result of this journey, we have far greater buy-in from teachers, and we have also managed to develop the planning and subject knowledge of new and experienced colleagues.
A collaboratively-planned curriculum that is shared across a chain of schools, or even a country, is such a pure and simple solution, but, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, such solutions are rarely pure and never simple.
In defence of centralised schemes of work
Lisa Lott is a secondary English teacher in Oldham. She says:
For me, curriculum planning is like baking a cake. You have your list of ingredients (the topics and skills you need to cover) and you follow a recipe to produce a bake (or curriculum) ready for students to devour.
But unlike cake-baking, it can’t be done in isolation; if everyone is following a different recipe, they will produce different cakes. So how do we make sure our students get a similar diet? We can’t teach them all in the same way: differentiation, scaffolding, stretch and challenge are always necessary, but we must make sure the content within the curriculum we teach is fair and equitable.
This is where centralised schemes of learning play an important role. They include the key ingredients, the lynchpin ideas, planned in line with the national curriculum and organised into a form of documentation for the whole teaching team to follow. This documentation could take the form of medium-term plans, knowledge organisers, booklets or PowerPoint presentations if that is what works for the team implementing them.
Ultimately, this is down to departments to decide but I believe that centralised planning ensures consistency and helps hugely with staff workload and wellbeing, particularly for ECTs or long-term supply staff who haven’t had the time or experience to build up a bank of resources.
It doesn’t have to be death by PowerPoint but organisation is key. If you are not organised then consistency goes out of the window. But, if there is a recipe to follow and it is the right one, disaster can be avoided.
Centralised schemes should not signal an end to teacher autonomy or creativity; if managed well they can actually encourage staff CPD and the building of subject knowledge through collaborative planning and shared quality assurance processes.
There could even be optional standardised schemes made available by the Department for Education to ensure consistency across schools. But perhaps that’s a Victoria sponge too far…
