Two months ago my school introduced a new curriculum for Year 8 pupils (Year 7 in England) - one which promotes subject-specific knowledge as a precursor to domain-specific skills, one which enphasises the need to embed core knowledge in long-term memory, one which promotes explicit instruction with strong links to Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction and one which values the great importance of formative assessment / responsive teaching / low-stakes quizzing. It marks a slight change of emphasis away from Northern Ireland's Revised Curriculum, and away from an unwieldy and unworkable Key Stage 3 assessment system based on much-maligned level-descriptors.
In this blog I attempt to outline how we brought it about and our initial early findings.
Increasingly, direction in my school has been shaped by educational research. Our revised Learning and Teaching Policy from 2015 was shaped quite firmly on the Six Principles of Great Teaching outlined in Allison and Tharby's excellent book 'Making Every Lesson Count', with further input from the writing of David Didau amongst others. Little did I know at the time that - three years later - I would be writing the Modern Languages version of the 'Making Every Lesson Count' book! Our journey to a knowledge-rich curriculum actually started 14 months ago when we read Daniel Willingham's seminal book 'Why don't Students like School?' It was a game changer which led us onto other great educational literature such as Daisy Christodoulou's 'Making Good Progress' and Peps McCrea's 'Memorable Teaching'. A staff training day in August 2017 focused on some of this literature, and as a result the decision was taken to embed the following three maxims as the crux of our learning and teaching principles in our new School Development Plan:
* Subject-Specific Knowledge must precede domain-specific skill
* Memory is the residue of thought
* Assessment is the bridge between learning and teaching
In a previous blog post here I have outlined why we decided to revamp our curriculum.
In October we gave staff a folder of research and a day to read from home (or Costa Coffee, or the top of a mountain - it didn't matter, as long as they read!). The folder was arranged in sections based on the above maxims, and included the writing of Daniel Willingham, E.D. Hirsch, David Didau, Peps McCrea, Daisy Christodoulou, Katharine Birbalsingh ('Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers') and Joe Kirby, amongst others.
At the same time we launched a staff professional development portal, in which we brought together as much of the current articles and research linked to the development of knowledge-rich curricula as we could.
We were fortunate enough to be able to send staff over to visit the Michaela School, Wembley, Barry Smith at Great Yarmouth Charter Academy and to visit Daisy Christodoulou in London. These visits helped to shape our emerging concept of a curriculum which would reduce the Matthew Effect, close the knowledge gap and ensure our children had access to a curriculum which was coherent, cohesive and apt to ensure many doors remain open for them and that the aspiration of attending higher education for all pupils - should they wish - becomes a reality. No labels, no limits, is our mantra.
It was thanks to our research-centred philosophy that we came across the ARK English Mastery curriculum. This knowledge-based approach to teaching English, centred on the philosophies of Willingham, Hirsch and Christodoulou amongst others, evidences findings that pupils undertaking the curriculum are 6 months further on in their mastery of English Language than their peers in other schools who do not undertake it by the end of Key Stage 3. Two trips to London later, and we were convinced. Such was our commitment to introducing the English Mastery curriculum that we have revised our Year 8 curriculum to allow for 2 hours additional English for three-quarters of our pupils, and an additional 3 hours for the remaining quarter with lower reading ages. We look forward to welcoming Nick Wallace over to visit us in November - the first school in Northern Ireland to introduce this curriculum.
As part of our preparations, we spent a long time focusing on what our Knowledge Organisers should look like. I don't mean aesthetically, although we have spent time looking at aesthetic strategies for the presentation of KOs which avoid cognitive overload. I mean in terms of content, of course. And a big shout-out here to Martin Robinson, whose book Trivium21c shaped our discussions on what knowledge we should be teaching our children and should be represented in the KOs. Eventually we decided on the following as our benchmarks:
* the core knowledge our children need to know for future success
* the best of what has been thought and said in the discipline in question
* cultural capital (eg in Physics the fact that Northern Ireland's Dame Joycelyn Burnell Bell co-discovered the first radio pulsars, or in English the writings of Seamus Heaney).
We also discussed at length how this knowledge would build cumulatively across the Key Stage.
At the same time we reinforced our understanding of Explicit Instruction, using Rosenshine's Principles, and evidence / research in relation to a child's journey from novice to expert. Didau writes well about this here . Children in our classrooms are not experts, and yet the Revised Curriculum encourages teachers to get pupils to 'think like scientists' or 'think like historians' etc on occasions. This, of course, is endeavoured in the Revised Curriculum through teacher facilitation, group work, kinaesthetic learning and independent research / thinking skills / personal capabilities. For us at Markethill High, explicit instruction is about the teacher teaching from the front, imparting their knowledge in a direct manner and using low-stakes formative assessment to identify misconceptions, gauge progress and respond appropriately. We believe in purposeful drill, rehearsal and spaced / interleaved recap. We believe in the power of worked examples (I would recommend Craig Barton's book 'How I wish I'd taught Maths', as well as his excellent podcast with Greg Ashman on this matter). As a result, we have procured high-quality visualisers for every single classroom in the school.
And so, in August 2018, our new knowledge-rich curriculum was introduced with a visit from the brilliant Tom Sherrington to undertake staff training on Mode A + Mode B teaching - a concept from his book 'The Learning Rainforest'.
8 weeks in? How are we getting on? Well, our children have their Knowledge Organisers out in every subject. They self-quiz every evening for 20-30 minutes. We created a self-quizzing step-by-step for parents and pupils based on an excellent model we found from the Magna Academy, Poole, website (which we have credited on our own resource!). Our pupils undertake IXL self-quizzing and much Quizlet self-quizzing also. They have learned by heart Invictus and Ozymandias, in our belief that we must return pupils to the notion of learning poetry for the great wealth of learning experience it brings and for the purposes of cultural capital.
Whilst early days, and whilst a small number of children have struggled a little with organisation and the establishment of routine, after 8 weeks I am already hearing anecdotes of pupil knowledge being much more solid and even advanced than in previous years, and this is even starting to be noticed in test scores. Indeed, my own Year 8 class have been internalising PROFS (Past - Reasons - Opinions - Future - Subjunctive) structures as part of their French. After 8 weeks, they can recite some subjunctive structures in French, as well as clearly articulate (in French) the academic register for accents and their purpose. When it comes to explicitly teaching the structures at a later stage, their automaticity of multiple structures in long-term memory will have forged patterns which will allow them to think more deeply - and creatively - in the discipline than students who do not have this automaticity.
It is my firm conviction that this curriculum will close the knowledge gap, and narrow the Matthew Effect at arguably one of the most important junctures in a child's education. For Markethill High School, there is no going back, and the glass ceiling fast approaches.
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