Primary Curriculum-Models and Design

In my last post I talked about the need for a curriculum that helps prepare children for the future.   There are some key qualities I believe should be at the heart of a new curriculum rather than left to chance outside of it.   These qualities are not easy to measure in any tangible form and this may go some way to explaining their absence from many classrooms.  In his book ‘Building Learning Power‘ Guy Claxton explores some different reform models from around the world that are helping children develop their ‘learning power’.

The Golden Key Schools in Russia operate along the lines of extended families.   They follow Vygotsky‘s philosophy and an understanding of the process of interaction is implemented within the Zone of Proximal Development by placing children from 3 – 10 years in family units of 15 – 25 rather than traditional, age grouped, classes. Staff attend training to develop a ‘community of learning’ and parents are also active in school events with the emphasis placed on learning as a community.   Amongst the other examples Claxton looks at as models for developing collaboration and communication are Ann Brown‘s Communities of Inquiry in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the PEEL project in Victoria, Australia.  Bellaire Primary School in Victoria allows older pupils to take a more active role in planning their learning by running skills workshops which the children attend before taking part in application classes where they put the skills they have learned to practical use.  The children very quickly learn to plan their own timetable and learning, making it relevant to their own interests.  This brave approach develops independence and lifelong learning skills that can only help the children as they move into secondary education and beyond.

Others, such as Ralph Pirozzo and Lane Clarke have explored curriculum design and come up with practical ways of using Bloom’s Taxonomy and Gardner’s Mutiple Intelligences to create active learning experiences.   INSET training with both these educators and  research into other curriculum models such as the International Primary Curriculum and the International Primary Baccalaureate informed our own work on curriculum development.  Our own design has also been influenced by the work of Chris Quigley who has developed a progressive skills based approach that puts key learner qualities centre stage.  Chris takes his lead from the work of Claxton but he breaks down ‘Learning to Learn‘ skills into Bronze, Silver and Gold stages to help plan for progression.   The children easily understand the breakdown of Learning to Learn skills and Chris goes into detail, creating ‘I can’ statements for each of the following key learner qualities:

Reflective – planing, revising, reviewing

Relationships – collaboration, empathy, listening

Resilient – managing distractions, ‘stickability’

Resourceful – questioning, imagining, making links

Risk Taking – have a go, not scared of being wrong

The Skills Based Curriculum developed by Chris Quiqley not only gives pupils more ownership over their own learning but helps with planning for progression.  It would be great to see the work of these and other educators such as Sir Ken Robinson and Mick Waters, being considered by government as they look at the Primary Curriculum.

Related Articles

• Free national curriculum from ministerial meddling (guardian.co.uk)
• Curriculum in a Coma (smichael920.wordpress.com)
• Searching for the Now (myedthoughts.wordpress.com)

Mistrusted, mistreated, misgivings

People say we’re in a time of opportunity, a time when we can shape our educational future like never before.   I hope that’s true.   It has caused me to reflect a little on what has gone before and there are some underlying themes throughout our recent history that are worth considering.

In his book ‘Unfinished Revolution’ John Abbott asks do we want ‘battery hens or free range chickens?’  This strikes me as a good metaphor for our curriculum journey.   It gets to the heart of the debate about whether the curriculum develops independent thinkers, confident learners who are resilient, reflective and like taking a risk, or whether it sacrifices these qualities for coverage, pace and shallow learning experiences.   Education is contstantly at the forefront of political debate these days, it’s a vote winner if the cards can be played to suit the electorate.   The curriculum was firmly grasped by government in the late 70s.   The Tyndale affair and Jim Callaghan‘s subsequent Ruskin college speech led to a standardised model which meant schools could no longer follow their own teachers’ interests and enthusiasms.   Callaghan claimed the landscape was uneven, the quality of provision too variable.   The National Curriculum followed and with it a whole raft of new powers for government.   It saw the end of a long period without government intervention and heralded in the 1988 Education Reform Act and a period of constant tinkering and meddling.   Subsequent governments have not been bold enough to go the whole hog in terms of reform and for fear of losing anything (and upsetting middle England) they simply added more and more content to an already overcrowded curriculum.

The 1988 Act introduced us to the ‘Kentucky Fried Curriculum’ (you run the restaurant, we’ll set the menu) and ‘karoake teaching’. It ushered in an era of mistrust and misgivings about the profession to such an extent that a DfE spokesman in the early 1990s saw fit to announce:

‘We have set out arrangements for what is effectively a ‘teacher proof curriculum’.   Centrally dictated, centrally controlled and centrally monitored.’

Such sentiments hardly imbue you with the belief that teachers were going to be treated with any professional respect!  That lack of trust has been a constant over the last 30 years.   A time where politicians have intervened with the electoral clock ticking behind them as they unleash one masterplan after another bent on winning votes and keeping them in office.   The problem with political interference is it has a short shelf life, and education needs time – long term solutions not quick wins as Andy Hargreaves so  convincingly argues.   It is no good for policy makers to continually look back at their own halycon, often privileged education and use it as a benchmark for taking us forward.   We need more than this if we are to meet the needs of learners for an uncertain future.

If this is the time of opportunity we’re being told it is, then policy makers have to show a some professional respect for educators, some trust in our ability to know how to develop learners and some faith in us to plan a curriculum that meets children’s needs.

Sources: Unfinished Revolution – John Abbott, Reinventing Schools, Reforming Teaching – Bangs, Macbeath and Galton