Teacher autonomy is a hot topic at the moment. The blame for a loss of agency is often placed on centralised curricula and resources. But is that really such a bad thing? I would argue that it is not, as shown by our use of booklets and other centralised products.
More than ever, we need teachers and leaders who are empowered and confident, with the vision, wisdom and expertise with which to make subject-specific decisions. Our children deserve this. But we are getting ourselves tied up in knots about teacher agency and curriculum booklets, PowerPoints, worksheets and other types of resourcing.
These discussions are sometimes helpful, but more often than not, I wonder whether we are trying to answer the wrong questions. Perhaps it would be more fruitful to ask how we ensure that all teachers have the opportunity to use their knowledge, creativity and craft in the curriculum-making process.
Related:
This question prioritises a different type of thinking. Rather than boiling the curriculum down to a resource, it encourages us to think about the curriculum in high resolution. In my academy trust, Astrea, this has helped us to distinguish between curriculum and product.
By “curriculum”, we mean the intent, the rationale, the sequence and the content, as designed by our expert subject communities (made up of heads of department and teaching teams). Our teaching teams have thought hard about the curriculum, and these debates have helped our communities to decide where there should be agency in curriculum and where there shouldn’t.
Teacher autonomy and the curriculum
Our geography subject community, for example, felt that it is important that all our children encounter a UK landscape early in Year 7. Our history subject community, meanwhile, felt that the history of coal mining was important in our South Yorkshire schools, but less so in Cambridgeshire.
By “product”, we mean anything that is born from the curriculum, such as a booklet, teacher guide or other resource. Products do not look or feel the same between schools. Instead, they reflect the subjects, contexts and cohorts. By being clear that we want to maintain fidelity at the level of the common curriculum, it means that we can create space for vital thinking, reflection and adaptation of these products.
And so we produce exemplar booklets centrally, which departments then have the agency to amend and improve, through teachers using their creativity and craft.
Space to think
We know that time has a major impact on teachers’ perception of agency. One way to prioritise time is to provide space to think (we call that “intellectual preparation” here and it is a core part of each teacher’s weekly timetable). During this time, our departmental teams are engaged in school-level curriculum-making.
With our booklets, we know that we can embed considered encounters with high-quality texts throughout the curriculum, and print them centrally to reduce workload and panic printing on a Monday morning. We can also build in dyslexia-friendly fonts, good line spacing and line numbers, all of which will help to ensure that our most vulnerable learners are supported. Additionally, our use of high-quality images that can be revisited multiple times reduces cognitive load.
By designing curricula and then allowing space for thinking about the products, we hope that we can prioritise the creation of fruitful encounters. By, for example, using a booklet and sequence of lessons in intellectual preparation to think about adaptations, common misconceptions and ways in. For many of our early-career, non-specialist teachers, this process can be invaluable.
Ultimately, we all want a brilliant curriculum, expertly taught. To achieve this, we need teachers who have the agency to be curriculum-makers. They need to be free to engage with and understand their curriculum and discipline. They need to deeply understand their context and their children. It serves nobody to have a system that creates work and duplicates effort.
It is imperative that we create the conditions for teachers to use their knowledge, and guarantee their agency to adapt the products of the curriculum in a quest to ensure fruitful encounters between children and content. Perhaps more important than all of this, to ensure our children are successful.
Matt Carnaby is director of curriculum and assessment at Astrea Academy Trust
