Leaders and teachers have spent a lot of time in the past year carefully considering their curriculum approaches and the importance of what they are teaching and when. Beautifully organised maps and carefully sequenced progression has dominated lots of thinking.
Despite the disruption to the summer term, it might be tempting to still launch straight into these plans in September. After all, you have designed an amazing curriculum, and prepared resources and learning sequences to enthral and enrich.
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But maybe you should instead take a moment to pause and reconsider which elements of your curriculum are the most important for September.
Here’s what I would do.
1. Strip back
Return to those plans you have drawn up and think about what it is you needed your students to have taken from their studies earlier in the year, before the world changed. Make sure the main learning points from the different topics are clear.
What are the threshold concepts that will enable students’ thinking to change? These could be seemingly simple things such as the plot of a text or they could be some of the bigger ideas, such as how a writer presented ideas of gender or conflict.
Whatever these may be, it is unlikely that you will be able to cover everything that you originally intended so you need to prioritise. Depending on how much time in the classroom is eventually lost, you may have to be quite brutal, culling texts and activities that you would have enjoyed teaching but aren’t as high tariff for your students’ learning.
2. Look back
Once you have stripped the curriculum back to the key concepts, you can make plans to find out where your students are at with those concepts. Carefully designed quizzes, either online or in the classroom, should be able to give you an idea of what has been retained and what needs to be revisited. Plan opportunities to intersperse practice of older learning with any new learning taking place, so you can increase long-term storage in the memory, fluency of retrieval and build schemas, which link ideas together.
3. Look forward
When you are reconsidering the curriculum, it is also important to look forward as well as back. Many of you will have already done this when planning your curriculum, thinking about the end goal for your students carefully and building towards it over the years.
However, when you are thinking about the key concepts you wanted to embed, take some time to evaluate which of these concepts will most significantly inform future learning.
If, for example, you know that they will be looking at a Victorian novel next October, it might be worth emphasising earlier texts studied that relate to this in style or theme. Include a review of these in your current plans to prepare students or even weave some extracts into homework reading tasks, to familiarise students with these for later.
Try to avoid the temptation to over focus on the exam specifications, though, as we don’t know what changes might be put in place. Look at the learning that students need to be able to be the most effective critical readers, writers and communicators.
4. Be realistic
I have heard the ‘it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon’ analogy made numerous times over the past few months, but I won’t apologise for using that again here.
You aren’t going to be able to cover everything you may have originally intended. You won’t be able to catch students up in the first few days or weeks. You won’t be able to necessarily progress at the same rate as you may have expected before with rotas and other measures still in place, even if you have a perfect blend of home and classroom learning. So, concentrate on what matters, don’t be afraid to take time to reflect and expect to build back up to normality gradually.
Zoe Enser is lead English adviser for Kent. She tweets @greeborunner
