How to Improve Your English Curriculum
Teaching is king, but curriculum is queen and she wears the trousers.
If you have a great curriculum, even your newest or least skilled teacher will achieve great progress.
If you have a culture of students working hard, then your progress will be huge. If you are not lucky enough to work in such a school, the curriculum can also make students want to work harder, because they will remember more.
Here’s my 20 point checklist to improve your curriculum
Have we defined what students must know, and made knowledge organisers to record it?
Have we mapped retrieval questions precisely against the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve so that the knowledge organisers are in long term memory (through homework, in class retrieval and assessment)?
Do we make sure each student answers each retrieval question, whether they know the answer or not? (Memory pays no attention to blanks, only to mistakes).
Do our knowledge assessments test enough of the domain to give us valid data?
Do assessments happen as part of the spacing suggested by Ebbinghaus, rather than the calendared reporting dates?
Do our assessment tasks test what we would value, even if there were no GCSE?
Are there enough questions or marks for middle ability students to score? (Have we used Bloom's Taxonomy to design them?)
Do we have models of good and excellent for each writing task and assessment? Have we decided precisely what to teach from these?
Do students get enough goes at the writing tasks we value - writing stories, poems, persuasive and argumentative pieces, etc, or do we just do one or two a year and pretend this will help students master them?
Are our models, resources and tasks organised in booklets, so all students can learn the exact content they need, regardless of absence or the skill of the teacher?
Do we read books first and quickly, and only analyse them once students know the whole plot and characters?
Have we stopped making each unit fit each term, so we teach each unit as quickly as it needs?
Have we stopped marking in books, so that we use models and student work for whole class feedback?
Do we use our assessment data, book looks and learning walks to find what is working well and get teachers to share how they have done it at every department meeting?
Are visualisers compulsory and used every single lesson to demonstrate what we want, and to critique students’ work (especially at random)?
Do we have a strategy and curriculum for AO6 punctuation and control of sentences, or is it lost in the weeds of our curriculum - they’ll have to pick it up as we go?
Do we waste time teaching vocabulary explicitly, or do we plan for vocabulary acquisition through our texts, our models, our booklets? (We learn from meeting words in different contexts, not by parroting definitions).
Do students draft and redraft, so that they get better and better and we can test the impact of our teaching, or do we move on to the next task and hope students will apply our feedback there?
Do we try to measure the impact of everything we do using data and numbers - are we counting what matters?
Do we plan experiments, where teachers try different approaches, follow hunches or passions, and report back on what difference this makes to progress and assessment?
Find out what all these look like in action, and the key teaching techniques which will double your impact, HERE.