Curriculum Design 2 (Mary Myatt)

When I say Mary Myatts book ‘The Curriculum: Gallimaufry to coherence’ made me fall in love with curriculum design, I am making an understatement. As Tom Sherrington says in the forward ‘Mary Myatt knows how to hook you in and get you thinking.’ The chapters are concise and straight to the point and it’s probably the only book in which I have paid as much attention to the footnotes (in which she provides a wealth of resources) as I did to the main words in the chapters of the book.

Areas of the book that particularly stood out for me and influenced the way we shape our curriculum at the Secondary school I am currently at are:

Curriculum coherence – which along with Summer Turners book ‘Secondary Curriculum and Assessment Design’ (mentioned in the previous blog) sparked interesting Leadership conversations about the curriculum model we were offering as a whole school. In this chapter, Mary stresses how we are ‘pattern seeking individuals’ and therefore the curriculum needs to tell a story. Each one of our middle leaders has spent a considerable amount of time identifying this story, its key themes and threads that run throughout it and are trying to communicate it to the students. What has surprised me, certainly in history which I teach, is how quickly students from year 7 – 11 have caught onto this, understanding what they need to learn now and how it will connect to what they learn in the future.

Cognitive science – Linked to the above Mary highlights ‘curriculum is content structured as narrative over time.’ This had a huge impact on myself and the middle leaders I have worked with. How do we communicate this narrative to students? It has been interesting to see what teachers are doing. Some have it on their first slide. Others have a big sign on their board saying ‘Why are we learning this?’ which reminds them to start each lesson with a conversation about how the lesson fits into the whole to help chunk information. With it, has come the realisation that this is not something you ‘do’ but something we ‘we will do always.’

Chapters on Curriculum products and Beautiful Work place the emphasis firmly on what the student is doing which is often surprisingly forgotten when middle leaders have their heads down in planning. This shaped our observation forms in which we write not only to look at what the teacher does but what students do. Interestingly, this was particularly helpful when working with teachers who give their all in the lesson but often end up ‘carrying’ it, to help these staff shift some of that responsibility onto the students.

As a Vice principal the section on Leadership has provided with me no end of food for thought about how I structure CPD and give all staff time to understand the finer nuances of their curriculum, as well as how we go about communicating this curriculum journey to department members and students. You are a leader if you find yourself in the front of the classroom so I suggest everyone read this.

Sections on Etymology, Speaking and Writing – have influenced our Knowledge Organisers which we are using this time in lock down to redesign with curriculum journeys in mind. This has also influenced out Literacy programme and our quick low stakes tests which emphasise language.

I could go on forever, this book has nuggets of cold scattered throughout it which are communicated simply but beautifully. Some of the above may seem obvious now as we are bombarded with information about curriculum design but two years ago when I was stepping into a new role it was the simplicity with which curriculum design was explained and how it linked to every aspect to the school, which attracted me to this book. I would thoroughly urge everyone in education to read it so they can see the curriculum for the critical, wonderful, backbone it provides to schools.

Curriculum Design 1 (Summer Turner)

At the start of this year I took on the role of Vice Principal for a large secondary school. A key priority for the school, which had had several changes in middle leadership, was to help middle leaders develop their curriculum plans, understand them and be able to communicate them with others and their own staff as well as communicating the student journey to students.

Two key books played a phenomenal role in this. Mary Myatt’s (@MaryMyatt) book ‘The Curriculum: Gallimaufry to Coherence’ which made me fall in love with curriculum design by carefully explaining its merits and the thought process that needed to go behind each element of planning. Summer Turner’s (@ragazza_inglese) ‘Secondary Curriculum and Assessment Design’ really highlighted the challenging questions I and the leadership team I was joining needed to tackle in order to ensure that curriculum design was being conducted in a coherent way. I will focus on the latter book in this post.

Here is how I used some of their Summer’s within the school this year:

Summer Turner’s Secondary Curriculum and Assessment Design:

If you’re new to curriculum design (and even if you’re not) Summer breaks down everything! Lots of definitions, explanations and lots of clarity of terms we may confuse.

Getting clear about whole school Curriculum Intent

The Self – Assessment in Chapter 2 was brilliant to use with the Leadership team. Not only did it give us some crucial questions to discuss but was a quick way of me learning about the new school I had just joined and also the thinking of the leadership team around curriculum. We had some brilliant, open and honest discussions about the purpose of our curriculum and our ambitions for our students. I honestly believe if this hadn’t happened we would not be singing off the same hymn sheet as we do now when line managing middle leaders.

Some of the questions were really challenging for example:

Should you teach to the test if it means pupils will perform well in exams?

These questions made us question our moral purpose and what we were in education for.

The self-assessment also asks you to assess yourself and your confidence in areas. Which meant we could help each other in area where we felt less confident. Not confident with how assessment data is used? Let another member of the leadership team explain it to you.

Learning from others

The book also introduced me to some great twitter handles to follow and brilliant tweeters!

As well as social media, Summer also makes numerous book recommendations which I will get through one day! Combined these ideas from other thinkers and institutions allowed me to challenge our own ideas in school to have deeper discussions around curriculum.

Sequencing

Summer’s questions around sequencing led to some hot debates. Questions such as:

  • Whether we sequence year by year and if not how do we accommodate students who join us at different times.
  • How much we want to invest in making connections across subjects, how we do this and whether this is a longer term plan.
  • How we would communicate cognitive science and knowledge acquisition and memory to all staff so it would influence their teaching practice and when we would do this.

All of the above were considered but not necessarily given equal weight in the first year. I had to remember that a few well executed changes and initiatives are better that a heap of poorly communicated ones.

Taking this approach with middle leaders

Once leadership was clear about the above questions we started to discuss these questions with middle leaders. Explaining how we had agreed on our whole school curriculum intent and ensuring that we were open to middle leaders opinions and ready to adapt where necessary.

In my next post I will post about what we shared in middle leaders meetings and he discussions we had as well as our curriculum template.

It would be great to hear how other curriculum leaders have led curriculum design in there schools. Curriculum design is an ever changing beast. It is something that we must and should, adapt, tweak and amend year after year to meet the needs of our students so I think the more ideas the better!

Thank you to Summer Turner for the support she has provided our school in doing this.