Flat packed curriculum – David Didau

“It is so effortless to be mistaken – and to persist in getting erroneous – when the costs of currently being incorrect are paid out by some others.”

Thomas Sowell

Why do we acquire so considerably flat pack household furniture? 1st, it is lots of periods more economical than bespoke hand-designed home furniture, and 2nd, it also will save us the not inconsiderable price tag of getting to make it ourselves from scratch. It also permits to switch out-of-date, unfashionable outdated items handed down from our grandparents and implement our personal taste to the houses we reside in.

In applying the KS3 English curriculum we have produced at Ormiston Academies Trust (see listed here for details) we have uncovered the flat pack metaphor a useful just one for detailing to departments and teachers what it is we intend them to do with it. Like IKEA, we have supplied all the items needed to build a upper body of drawers or a wardrobe, and all lecturers will need to do is meticulously read the instructions, carry together their own metaphorical equivalents of a screwdriver and a hammer, and start off turning the raw components into lovely sequences of classes.

This is supposed to be an antidote to the ‘plug and play’ approach to English educating characterised by Barbara Bleiman here:

Coming soon, to a school near you…
Interview:
Q: How well can you follow someone else's ppt?
Q: Are you good at marking quizzes someone else wrote?
Q: Can you teach something you've not thought through yourself?
Q: Can you forget what you loved about the way you were taught?

— Barbara Bleiman 🎓 Education is Conversation (@BarbaraBleiman) September 25, 2022

Earlier, I have argued against the use of PowerPoint as a suggests for applying the curriculum and share some of Barbara’s problems at the way lecturers are ever more envisioned to simply deliver a established of slides published by another person else. But, as has been lifted by many English teacher responding to Barbara, the alternate seems rather bleak. My instructing job, which started in the late 1990s, was significantly from the halcyon idyll eulogised by some. My first head of section gave me a duplicate of 101 Red Sizzling Starters and informed me to instruct what ever I fancied from the stock cabinet. I had no clue what I was executing. Pointless to say, the students I taught have been terribly enable down. Had an individual been ready to give me a totally resourced, sequenced curriculum I’d have bitten their arms off. Rather, I labored into the wee hrs arranging pointless activity pushed classes which – I desperately hoped – would charm to my pupils more than enough that they’d sit in their seats and cease striving to stab each individual other with scissors. This was prolonged ahead of lesson methods ended up routinely uploaded on to the world-wide-web and my only decision was to cobble alongside one another wonky techniques of work myself or wing it. This was what my far more expert colleagues seemed to do. They by no means appeared to publish something down and just emptied the contents of the minds into the classrooms, generally to mesmerising result. It not often labored that way for me nevertheless.

Sadly, it wasn’t until finally a lot of a long time afterwards that I was lucky enough to get the job done in a section in which we labored collaboratively on techniques of get the job done which we had collectively agreed upon. But even then, lecturers would upload their slides to the shared location for other instructors to use or adapt as they observed suit with incredibly little knowing of what the function of the curriculum was.

When, in 2015, Ofsted released Crucial stage 3: the wasted several years? it was a fairly honest critique of all the things I’d expert. Decades 7 to 9 was an interminable keeping floor the place children circled until they were permitted to start out learning GCSE technical specs. No marvel so several universities chose to annex Year 9 into Crucial Stage 4.

Our curriculum is – we hope – much improved than some scuffed middle ground of tired consensus. As a substitute, it usually takes the best of the present and the past and provides lecturers with every little thing they will need to educate superb, energetic, remarkable classes that induct kids into the fantastic mysteries of language and literature. It took at group of 5 English lead practitioners hundreds of hours to build. Every single has then been piloted in at the very least 1 of our educational facilities and feed-back taken where by there are kinks to iron out and advancements that want to be created. This iterate approach by no usually means will make our curriculum fantastic, but it has resulted in a top quality of means which few university-primarily based lecturers would be able to match. The student anthologies and instructor guides we provide are mini masterpieces of layout, craft and assumed.

We are entirely knowledgeable that no matter what a central setting up staff might conceive is constantly mediated (occasionally awesomely, occasionally disastrously) by academics. So, we’ve embraced this inevitably and offered lecturers with everything they have to have to know and allow them to assemble it as they feel most proper for their college students.

This is all some lecturers want. But a lot of many others require guidance putting into all into action. With this in intellect, we arrive up with 5 main pedagogies which we’ve located to be easy to put into apply and remarkably efficient at serving to pupils make this means from their classes. These are:

• Couch to 5k crafting – this sentence degree method combines ‘the deconstructed essay’ for analytical crafting and ‘slow writing’ for resourceful and transactional writing. This incorporates a lot of stealth grammar teaching, but it’s all in support of indicating. There are 9 deconstructed essay sentences and 30 creative crafting sentence varieties that are specified across KS3.
• Looking through fluency – a method not only for increasing students’ orthographic consciousness but a single which also has an impact on comprehension. It contains lots of oral investigation which builds up to performances of brief sections of texts. It helps make for some of the most enjoyable lessons I’ve at any time taught or seasoned and when it college students make it work, it is electric! (See far more here.)
• Structured dialogue – this is our oracy technique which is also designed to assist learners orally rehearse their suggestions and so make improvements to not only their capability to discussion but also to generate. (Here’s a website I wrote about this tactic some yrs ago.)
• Say it, Spell it, Know it – an method to instructing subject matter terminology and subject vocabulary which does specifically what it says. It consists of heaps of entertaining with etymology and morphology.
• Retrieval and hinge questions – we partnered with Carousel Understanding to guarantee retrieval exercise is quick, fun and successful and inspire the use of mini white boards for hinge questions. I’ll compose additional on this at a later date.

Most of our faculties have adopted different methods to lesson composition to which lecturers are meant to adhere and these 5 pedagogical strategies will have to be adaptable adequate to be used with any lesson composition. Of study course, academics can pick out not to use any or all of these main pedagogies, but the moment they’ve noticed them in action, most instructors by no means seem back again. And, similarly definitely, there are several other components to terrific English teaching – we stimulate instructors to use whichever approaches they discover enjoyable and helpful – but these 5 supply a good basis for earning certain every thing else you may well want to do is more successful.

For all those who have the time and ability to make a curriculum that is as good or much better than the 1 we have built, they are welcomes to adapt any of our means or are equally welcome to overlook them. But if you are likely to argue what English educating should really be and hark back again to a lost entire world of young children dancing fortunately by means of solution gardens then you have to have to know that the previous wasn’t like for most of us. It was tricky and bleak and discouraging. Attempt to recall what it was like to be a new trainer, caught in the headlights of alien routines and sullen pupils and take into consideration the possibility that what you with all your a long time of acquiring knowledge may possibly want is unlikely to do the job as perfectly for the typical ECT.

It’s possible they’d benefit from a superior high quality, flat packed curriculum.