Is Your KS4 English Curriculum Working?
Maybe you’ve read The Checklist Manifesto?
The idea is simple - airplane crashes and catastrophic surgeries have reduced by mind boggling amounts. The secret - checklists. Checklists prevent you overlooking what is important. Every time.
This is my checklist for your curriculum. 31 questions. Once you’ve followed them through, your KS4 curriculum will create fantastic results, every time.
What is a fantastic result?
Well, if Progress 8 for your school is +0.2, and the English team’s is +0.2, there is nothing fantastic about your curriculum. You are exactly average for your school, and it is most likely that the very good P8 is because the school culture is excellent: students behave well and work hard.
(I’m not knocking that - students working hard is the number one way to improve progress, regardless of teaching, regardless of the curriculum).
Unless your department P8 is significantly above the school P8, your curriculum is underpowered.
Are Your Assessments Right?
The easy answer is yes - all our assessments use past paper questions. So they must be right.
Wrong, as you’ll see.
Your review should focus on these 4 areas in this sequence: assessments, models, knowledge, spaced retrieval.
Only once you know what you need to assess can you decide what you need to teach. This makes a profound difference to your curriculum, which my checklist will try to show you.
Language
Question 5 carries 50% of the language marks (narrative, description and persuasion for those who don’t do AQA). How many question 5s for both papers will students need to write in order to master this question? How many should they do given the proportion of marks? (Now compare that to how many they actually do).
In order to be proficient, how many question 5 answers, at standard and excellent, should students study to understand how to get the grade they aspire to? (Now compare that to how many you actually teach from).
If learning from these examples is crucial, what is the department approach for how to teach from a model answer - what do you draw out from it - what do students practise, and in what sequence, so that students get much better at the skills they need to focus on?
Do you have a booklet of these which you teach from, and from which students can revise?
16% of those 50% of the marks are awarded for AO6. If students completely understood how to use commas and started each sentence with a different word, what grade would they automatically get for AO6? (I don’t have time to prove this here, but the answer is grade 7, and a similar grade for AO5).
Do you have a curriculum sequence specifically for improving AO6? The answer is invariably no. But AO6 is worth more marks than questions 2 and 3 on both papers - so your students need to be better at it than those 4 questions, which you will practice a lot.
Question 4s, added together, account for 22.5% of the grade. Repeat questions 1-4 above for your teaching of Question 4s.
You have now practised 72.5% of the language exam. Question 2 of paper 1 and question 3 of paper 2 test exactly the same skills of analysing language. This is exactly the same skill of language analysis in all the literature questions. Given that, why aren’t all students getting 6/8 or 8/12? (The answer is always that you just haven’t trained them to write enough in the time limit).
How much of the grade is awarded for how fast you can write? Answer this by looking at the length of your mock answers, compared to the mark in each question. You are unlikely to come to a figure below 25%, and I would put it closer to 50%. Wherever you put it - does your curriculum teach students to write more and write faster?
Have you identified the top 8 language techniques which always come up, and which you must make students learn? (My offering: metaphor, personification, simile, alliteration, sibilance, contrast/juxtaposition, pathetic fallacy, semantic field).
Do you have a retrieval curriculum for these techniques to make sure students remember and use each one?
You have no doubt identified the key persuasive techniques that your students need to know. See question 11.
When you’ve answered all these questions, you will see that there are many more pieces of work to mark. Do you have a system for comparative judgement or whole class feedback which forces students to make their work, and minimises the time teachers spend marking?
The research on practice says that spaced practice - repeated goes at questions - has a much higher impact than massed practice - mocks. The main rationale for a mock is to give students experience of the whole exam. When should you do the mock so that students don’t forget these lessons? (The answer of course is April - you mark both questions 4 and both questions 5, and students mark the remaining questions themselves from your model answers at each grade - easily downloaded from Exam Pro).
(If you want to know how to implement any of this while reducing workload, let me know)
Literature
Have you identified the 5 most likely questions on each text?
Do you have model answers at standard and excellent for each one?
Repeat questions 3 and 4 above for each text.
Have you reviewed all past questions and used this to predict the two most likely questions for each text?
Have you sequenced your curriculum so that the full essay answers to these questions are studied and memorised?
Have you analysed the mocks and practice questions to see if the department approach to each question works? For example, is it better to write chronologically to show the development of a theme or character, or is it better to start with the extract? Does the poetry comparison work better jumping between the two poems for each point, or by writing about one in its entireity, and the next comparing back. Etc.
Have you identified how many quotes for each texts the students can learn, and then identified those quotes so that they match all of the most likely questions? (E.g. 15-20 for each text, 4 for each of your top 6 poems).
Do you have a retrieval curriculum that forces students to remember all of these?
Do your model essays at standard and excellent use enough of these quotes you’ve identified? (You might need to adapt the Exam Pro downloaded examples).
Have you used Exam Pro to identify how many words on average students need to write at each grade? (It is probably much greater than you expect, and much greater than the students default to in the mocks - 2 pages of A4 seems very common to me as their default).
Have you tested the methods you teach for the literature questions against the Exam Pro answers to see if these methods are necessary to each grade? And have you tested them against your mocks to see if the methods are contributing to the mark, or hindering it?
Have you analysed a range of Exam Pro essays at each grade to work out what students actually need to do at each grade? (This will be different from what you currently teach or assume - I guarantee it).
Do you have a thesis statement for each text that students are required to memorise and adapt to each question? (The author’s purposes remain the same, no matter the question, so one thesis statement per text will fit every question on that text).
Now you can see your mark load is potentially massive, so you must start using self assessment against the model answers and comparative judgement, and whole class marking.
Ebbinghaus Frogetting Curve
This tells us that the gap between each retrieval needs to double. This is highly specific - a far cry from this week, last month, last term style retrieval which just pays lip service to the real thing. Have you mapped this on a weekly basis from year 10 to year 11?
Have you mapped your practice questions and mock questions against the Forgetting Curve? For example, if you finish Macbeth in November of year 10, your retrieval of quotes during the 10 weeks of study should have followed the Forgetting Curve. By now the gap should probably be 1 month - December. The next gap is 2 months - February. The next gap is 4 months - June. So, students might answer a Macbeth question in any or all of those months. the next gap is 8 moths - February of year 11. (Notice in this scenario that a mock in November or December of year 11 is not an optimum time to set a Macbeth question, but a February mock is).
Homework
Have you mapped what will be retrieved in homework, in class retrieval and assessment against the Forgetting Curve? If you haven’t, students will be retrieving at the wrong intervals, and with the wrong frequency. You won’t truly be building long term memory, you’ll only be laying the foundations for it.