Thoughts from Mary Myatt’s Curriculum

At Easter this year I read Mary Myatt’s little book, Curriculum: Gallimaufry to coherence.

This is an excellent book, full of short, sharply written chapters that are bound to get you thinking about the wider narrative of your school curriculum. Now that the International Baccalaureate‘s Standard’s and Practice’s explicitly mention curriculum coherence, this would be recommended reading for any IB coordinator.

These are some of the questions that I asked myself, thoughts I had, or sections I highlighted as I read through the book:

• Why is a rounded education good?
• What is the aim of education?
• Why is important to build links to TOK?
• Where does my subject fit into the bigger picture of the curriculum?
• What is the story of the school curriculum?
• We need to avoid curriculum bittiness by thinking about the big picture – what is the essential ideas of what is being taught in lessons/units? e.g. biblical underpinnings of Macbeth taught in KS3 to inform the learning in KS4 of Macbeth
• The primary purpose of CPD should be to ensure that teachers can hone their subject knowledge and their pedagogical content knowledge.
• Schools should prioritise their teachers subject knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge development: school’s that don’t are like restaurant owners that don’t pay attention to their chef’s ingredients quality.
• Skills are not separate to knowledge. Comprehension of one text does not guarantee comprehension of another.
• What are the unifying ideas of each curriculum? – these are the ideas that come up again and again within subjects and between subjects.
• Curriculum is a narrative, we need to get teachers out of their silo so that they can help students see how their subject learning fits in with others.

• Structuring units via questions might be the right track to do this?
• What is it that kids need to know in order to access the stuff we are teaching? This needs to be the focus of the vertical curriculum alignment.
• During INSET time can we set objectives of what we wish depts to achieve in their planning time together?
• Reducing workload isn’t about reducing work, it is about efficiency and time allocation. Work load is reduced so less is done with higher quality.
• While I was reading I tweeted the question: “What is source material in the sciences?” and I got this reply:

• This thinking about source material has made me think again about my approach to teaching IB Biology, but the question I was then struggling with was how to get students to effectively engage with that source material?

• I got an idea to answer this question during my philosophy for children training. So now I think that while focusing on curriculum is good, and focussing on concepts and ideas is good we need to ensure that teachers are effectively trained to do this.
• Learning happens when students are made to think about and with the material. This idea is repeated in the work of Daniel Willingham.
• Observations of teaching – do I know where the best practice is?
• Feedback is actionable, Grading is summative – both can be marking so long as we understand the point of the marking.
• Class blog – when we start a topic, students write notes on what they already know about that topic. They can then identify what they are unsure of and finally what questions they have about the topic. The posts can be updated and revisited as students move through the unit/course.

• There has been a lot of time wasted on differentiation. It labels and limits what students can do and narrows the achievement gap.

• LOs as ticks on a checklist. Teacher ticks them off as they move through the syllabus. Instead we need to provide time for repetition. I would also add that a way to do this is move from learning objective to learning questions.
• What is being taught and how to teach it well should be the focus of meetings. SLT to communicate expectations to middle leaders.
• Learning should be authentic and link to real world issues and problems, and have some real world outcome if possible. Students work should be honoured, for the time and effort that they put into it.