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How to redesign the curriculum to enable deep learning

 

How did our curriculum become constrained? It has too much stuff, in too little time, in too little (or the wrong type of) space.

One of the major concerns of teachers in my school is the ‘clutter’ in the curriculum that has evolved over the past 20 years since the advent of the national curriculum in the UK.

The national curriculum was supposed to be a minimum outline content that was an entitlement for all students. Unfortunately, the national curriculum grew into a big beast, which became seen, by many, as all that schools were required to deliver. Many subjects are crammed into the 25 hours per week and the pupils flit from one subject to the next, having only skimmed the surface of any subject, making deep learning almost impossible.

During this period, educators have become deskilled in delivering the types of lesson that encourage deep learning, because of the pressure of covering ever-increasing content demands. Government initiatives, such as the key stage 3 strategy, tended to focus on content level descriptors. Even the assessment for learning strategy has tended to be focused around subject-specific learning objectives, rather than the skills or competencies required for effective learning. We won’t mention the effect of high stakes testing!

It is little wonder that we hear from universities and colleges that school leavers struggle with their courses and that there is a high drop-out rate. The requirement by this stage of education is that students are effective independent learners, but there is no real platform before this for students to have practised these skills and become proficient at them. Increasingly, coursework in the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) is being eroded due to plagiarism by the internet generation. How, then, do we meet the requirement that all pupils experience the deep learning opportunity, if the extended pieces of work are not valued. Again there is a preoccupation with content over skills, and of valuing measurement, not measuring value.

How has Longfield School begun to address these problems?

Step 1: investing in ICT

Two years ago, Longfield barely had a working computer. A re-allocation of resources and priorities allowed a massive investment in technology. Every classroom now has an interactive whiteboard and the school has a PC-to-pupil ratio of around 1:2. Pupils can now access their work from home and are encouraged to spend more time on school projects. The school has aimed for 24/7, 365 day access via the web and students have made great use of this facility. Our website - the portal into the work areas – gets more than 2000 hits a week.

Extensive classroom-based continuous professional development for staff ensured that they were confident with the use and implementation of ICT. This has enabled our pupils to work independently and creatively, whenever and wherever they are. Longfield School has since won national awards for its use of ICT across the curriculum.

To further encourage continuing deep learning, we need to be able to value e-portfolios of work produced over an extended period of time, in order to break the ‘teach to the exam’ cycle.

Step 2 – redesigning the curriculum

Longfield School is currently part-way through a curriculum review, to redesign the curriculum around the individual needs of our learners. This has included a much wider range of courses post-14 to enable pupils to show what they can do, rather than what they cannot. This has already delivered a significant improvement in results.
The next big innovation in creating an engaging curriculum for our students will be to introduce the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) ‘Opening Minds’ course with our year 7 pupils from September 2007. Our aim is to develop a competence-led and innovative curriculum, equipping students with the skills they require to become independent learners. This course is not content-based; instead the students spend extended amounts of time each week studying a particular topic, of which there are six in a year.

In Opening Minds there are five categories of competences:

• competences for learning
• citizenship
• relating to people
• managing situations
• managing information.

The course starts off with a Learning to Learn focus by teaching pupils about how their brains work and their preferred learning styles, and how they can become better learners.

To encourage independent learning, Opening Minds combines and integrates subjects with project-based learning, with fewer teachers, books or rooms. Opening Minds is part of our plan to personalise learning at Longfield, ensuring our students are prepared for the 21st century by creating lifelong learners. We hope to give our staff the opportunity to be more creative in their teaching and remove repetition and overlap from the year 7 curriculum.

The requirements of the national curriculum will then be delivered in years 8 and 9, with acceleration for gifted and talented pupils permitted, so that they can eventually access AS Critical Thinking in year 11.

Possible difficulties we envisage are moving staff away from their comfort zones, and sometimes out of their subject areas. There is clearly a need to re-skill or remind teachers of their abilities and give them the confidence to take risks in the classroom. Continuous professional development is central to the success of the project, as it was with the ICT transformation.

Step 3: building for the future

On our journey in transforming education in Longfield, it is becoming clear to the senior leadership team that the traditional classroom is a relic of the past. One teacher to 30 pupils: where is the evidence that this is a good ratio of staff to pupils? What about 1:150, 1:50, 1:15, 1:5 and 1:1? How can we engage with our learners in a much more meaningful way than the factory farm ideology that we have today? We do not need lots of small boxes with 30 pupils and one teacher separated by miles of corridor. We can build innovatively and, for the reason of encouraging deep learning, not because the architect thinks it will look nice! We need to be able to redesign new schools, without having a formula governing the dimensions that was determined on 19th century requirements. We look forward to a capital build project that will transform and transport education at Longfield into the 21st century and beyond.

We have come a long way in a short time, but still have a long way to go.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

The authors of this paper are Deputy Head, Mr Calvin Kipling and Assistant Head, Ms Susan Johnson, though we wouldn’t have a story without the rest of the team!

 

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