Hello Curriculum Thinkers,
The richest and best sequenced curriculum in the world is still useless if it’s not taught effectively and consistently.
Hundreds of hours of teachers’ planning goes down the drain. Students don’t get the results they are capable of. Nobody wins.
How can you avoid this story?
This week, we have four lessons about how your fellow members achieve more consistent teaching to improve curriculum delivery.
Each can be applied at any level and in any subject.
Why are we sharing these lessons?
The results of the Subject Curriculum Goals Survey revealed that “Curriculum delivery” - a.k.a. teaching (or the ‘i’ word (implementation) you might want to avoid) - is a key priority for you this year. 48% of respondents put it in their top three for 2023/24.
Four lessons about teaching consistently.
Plan (and practice) what you’ll teach together
Define the teaching principles you want to see in a lesson
Check it’s all happening as planned and discussed
Provide support where it’s not quite working
These are just four of the many lessons they’ve taught everyone inside the Curriculum Thinkers Community.
We’ve brought these lessons to life by giving you a sneak peek at some of their most useful slides and resources.
Follow links to watch their master classes and download their resources to get the full story about their work.
If you prefer to get all the links (including links to free content), in one place inside We Are In Beta…
1. Plan and practice what you’ll teach… together.
Co-Planning-Meetings - where subject teams plan and practice together - help you deliver more consistently across all departments and in all lessons. They can:
improve quality of teaching - by discussing knowledge and understanding with others so you can tailor to your students’ needs
support planning and delivery - by providing a regular checkpoint to ensure the aims of your units and long-term learning remain a focus and an opportunity to review gaps and respond
develop leaders in your department - by encouraging colleagues to plan, deliver and lead sessions which in turn improves their understanding of why they are teaching specific content and how they are teaching it
The resource above is an excerpt from Ark John Keats’ “Co-Planning Meeting - What To Do”, which guides colleagues on how to get the most out of the meetings, where they:
do the work students will do
discuss what it feels like to do it
plan activities to overcome misconceptions they spoke about and
practice delivering those activities to their colleagues, getting feedback in the process
⏯️ Watch their master class here
📝 Download resources here including:
Co-Planning Meeting - What To Do
Class Summary - What To Do
🙏Thank you Nat Nabarro, Mark Jesnick, Adele Barward-Symonns and Holly Welham.
You can also read how co-planning happens at another Ark school - Ark Acton here on page 13 of their Curriculum Handbook
🙏Thank you Oli Knight, Ruthie Jacobs and Sammy Clark for sharing your work.
2. Define teaching principles you want to see in a lesson.
As you may have seen from the Teaching and Learning Policy analysis we did recently, definitions of what successful teaching looks like vary from school to school.
What works in one school might not work in another. Some schools mandate a set lesson structure. Others don’t.
But what they do have in common are principles that guide teaching.
These are the principles schools across the Greenshaw Learning Trust use:
How do they work?
The principles of better practice - outline what the teachers do…
…so that - they achieve the pupil outcomes they are aiming for…
…[because] the evidence - tells us it’s a good bet.
⏯️ Watch their session on improving the quality of teaching here to learn how they’re used in practice.
📝 Download resources here including:
Principles of Teaching (with further reading)
Description of Developmental Drop In process
High Effective Feedback Training slides
Mason Davies (Assistant Headteacher, Gloucester Academy) shared his entire T&L handbook here.
Do not miss this opportunity to download it. It is incredible.
3. Check it’s all happening as planned and discussed.
Once you have planned what you are going to teach and agreed how you’ll teach it, you need to check it’s happening according to plan.
There are lots of ways to do that including: learning walks, book looks, student voice and conversations with staff.
Harris Academy Battersea covers them all in their monitoring and evaluation process:
⏯️ Watch their master class here
📝 Download resources here including:
Curriculum Explorations Handbook (screenshots above)
Curriculum policy
Curriculum intent template
🙏 Thank you, Daniel Opoku, for sharing your work.
4. Providing support to improve where it’s not quite working.
Once you’ve identified what’s working and what’s not, you need to provide support to help teachers improve.
More and more schools are turning to Instructional Coaching to do that. One model (which has been simplified a lot below) is:
See it - provide opportunities for teachers to see success from their observed lesson and identify the gap between their practice and a model.
Name it - teachers name their next action step with tangible strategies.
Do it (with practice and follow up) - teachers practice (including scripting and perfecting plan) with their coach and then implement it in a lesson.
It sounds simple but it’s difficult to get right. It takes a lot of dedication and practice to become an expert instructional coach.
Lucky for you, the team at Reach Academy Feltham, did a live demo of how to do it well.
⏯️ Watch the live demo of instructional coaching here
📝 Download resources here including:
Instructional coaching training slides
Teaching and Learning Professional Development Handbook
Training reflection templates
🙏 Thank you, Manjit More, Tilly Browne and Claire Couves, for sharing your work.
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