Curricular thinking has made me a better teacher

There’s been lots said in recent days about curriculum. Is it of utmost importance to what schools do, or is it the latest phase which will pass only for us to look back and wonder why we thought it was so important? My belief is that curriculum is fundamental to what schools do, and that a focus on curriculum should be here to stay. By curriculum, I’m not talking about intent statements and curriculum maps, but thinking, and thinking deeply about the knowledge we teach. I feel strongly about this because thinking about the curriculum has made me a better teacher and a better subject leader, and I’d be sad to see such thinking falling away. 

Here’s my curriculum story.

For years as a teacher, I followed a scheme of work and taught what I was told to teach. I never thought about why I was teaching that particular content, it was on the exam specification or in the scheme of work, so I taught it without question and without thought. I never thought about the order in which I was teaching different concepts – within topics or on the scale of topics. I rarely thought explicitly about how different topics supported one another and how important it was to highlight and develop the links between them to ensure a rich understanding in my students. I never thought deeply about learning across a topic, year or key stage as a whole, only in individual lessons. I never really thought about how I would know that students were actually learning, and remembering, and able to use the knowledge I was teaching. I never thought about the word ‘curriculum’ at all, or heard it mentioned except in relation to the National Curriculum. Perhaps I was unusual, but I suspect I was not.

Instead, I blindly looked at the next lesson in the scheme of work and thought about how I could make it ‘interesting’ for my students. I spent hours planning activities which would engage them, enable them to discover the knowledge for themselves, and ensure that they had the right information written in their books thinking that this was all the evidence of learning that I needed. I spent a lot of time thinking about how I would engage students, but very little considering what I was teaching them or how best to make sure that they had understood. I spent untold hours writing mini-essays in student’s books with targets for improvement which they read, initialled, and promptly forgot. I set tests and then got students to fix all their errors by finding a student who got the question right and asking them to teach them – all they did was copy the answer and have a chat. I don’t think I was an awful teacher and I don’t lose sleep when I look back on those years, but putting curriculum at the forefront of my thinking was the catalyst which changed all this.

Thinking about the curriculum made me realise that what we teach students is fundamental to education. It seems such an obvious thing to say. So if teaching is why I’m a teacher, then giving time to think about our curriculum is vital. I started asking questions like these:

• What do we want students to know?
• Why do we want them to know that and not something else, or would either be valid?
• What is an effective teaching sequence for these topics or within this topic?
• How will I best explain this concept?
• How will I make sure students are thinking hard about and learning this?
• How will I check that students have understood?
• How will I know that students have learned?
• What will I do if they haven’t understood or learned?
• What prior knowledge do I need to check before I can teach this?

The list could go on and I realise that these are not all questions directly related to curriculum, they’re about pedagogy and assessment, and different people will have different answers, but they are questions which I have only really grappled with since I started to think seriously about curriculum, and knowledge, and what I want my students to get from their science education. They’re questions which tie in closely with curricular thinking – if I want students to know certain things by certain times, I need to be able to check that thy do, and to know what I’d do to address any gaps before moving on with the next part of the curriculum. This thinking, in turn, has led to me being a better teacher, and also working with my department to focus time away from admin, planning fancy lesson activities, and in-depth book marking, to thinking about the nitty gritty of what we teach, and when and why we teach it, developing better resources to help ensure that all students learn the curriculum I believe they are entitled to. The curriculum isn’t everything, but it’s so fundamental to what we do in schools and integral to everything which goes on in the classroom that it cannot be left to chance. The curriculum will never be done and I don’t think there is a perfect curriculum, but for me, thinking deeply about the curriculum has completely changed how I think about teaching. I hope for the better.

This is why I hope that curricular thinking is here to stay.