Our curriculum
Curriculum Design
The staff have been working collaboratively in reviewing our current curriculum offer and striving to develop and improve the curriculum offered to children within Shilbottle Primary.
Steps taken to develop the curriculum include:
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Meetings focused on the curriculum, which have included reviewing the current offer to ensure we can identify current working practices which are a strength of the curriculum and update areas where necessary.
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Staff meetings with a specific subject review as a priority. These meetings have included review of the topic maps, developing standardised formats for the newly implemented Knowledge Organisers, review of children’s work as a team to share areas for development and good practice.
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The development and creation of ‘Knowledge Organisers’ for the forthcoming half term.
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The inclusion of ‘Concepts’ within the Knowledge Organisers
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Subject Leaders leadership skills are being developed through supportive reviews to enable them to carry out more in depth reviews independently in their allocated Subject Leader time.
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Research including the Education Endowment Foundation’s ‘Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning Guidance Report’ alongside Rosenshine’s ten principles of instruction.
Following the staffing restructure in 2019/20 where classes have been reduced from single form entry (seven classes) to mixed age groups (five classes) the principles of the curriculum review in the previous year are continuing throughout this year to ensure full coverage at an age appropriate level.
Whilst our plans have been adjusted somewhat in the 20/21 academic year due to the pandemic we have continued to develop our curriculum offer. This year we have also moved from teaching all areas of the curriculum every week to ‘blocking’ the teaching and learning (linked to the Rosenshine Long Term Memory work).
Shilbottle Lesson Structure
Before the lesson
Teachers will consider the following elements when preparing a lesson:
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New Learning
What should children know or be able to do at the end of the lesson that they could not before? This should be broken into small steps and reviewed throughout the lesson.
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Questioning
Which key questions will be asked to ensure children have an understanding? (Target children to be able to feedback to the class what has been learned or actions need taken in line with the principles of Shanghai Maths Research carried out in school- repeat three times where appropriate. This will be applied across all areas of learning).
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Scaffolding strategies
Intent: Scaffolds are temporary supports to assist learning. The can include teacher modelling, teacher thinking aloud, cue cards, worked examples and checklists. Model own thinking to develop children’s metacognitive and cognitive skills. By verbalising their own thinking teachers are modelling their own thought process as an expert learner
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Review learning
Reviews of children’s understanding should be carefully planned at stages throughout the lesson and not one overarching review carried out at the end. This ongoing assessment will enable the teacher to identify children requiring support at an earlier stage.
The Lesson
The stages of a lesson.
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‘I am being a _______’.
Intent: This section of the lesson gives the children time to think of themselves as a scientist/historian etc and therefore recall the skills required. This time will allow children time to reflect on ‘themselves as a learner and how they learn’. They will be able to predict ways in which they may overcome the challenges they face within the lesson.
Implement: A list of skills required to be a Scientist/Geographer/Historian etc will be displayed and children will review skills they will need to use to access the learning in the forthcoming lesson.
Impact: Children will begin to recall how they have used key skills in the past and which strategies they deployed when they encountered obstacles thus developing their confidence and resilience in knowing overcoming challenges are part of the learning process.
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Links to learning - Concept links
Intent: Children are able to see links in prior learning and how they relate to current learning alongside how their current learning will be used in the future. This gives purpose to the learning and enables children to reflect on previous learning experiences.
Implement: Children will review a link in concepts they will be studying in the coming lesson and how these have been used in the past and where they will encounter them in the future.
Impact: Similar to the skills review children will become increasingly aware and confident to identify links in their learning and how their learning skills are transferable to other areas of the curriculum across a range of topics.
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Daily Review
Intent: This helps strengthen the connections in the materials being learned. This will also develop the automatic recall and frees working memory to develop problem solving and creativity skills.
Implement: All lessons will commence with a daily review. For all lessons the standard school template will be placed in children’s books each lesson to review prior learning.
Impact: Linked to the Rosenshine Long Term Memory Research the revisiting of work carried out in the past on a regular basis has a greater impact on the child’s ability to recall and remember. This will also demonstrate to children that all lessons are linked and learning is a continuous cycle.
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Introduction of new learning in small manageable stages
Intent: As the working memory can only deal with small amounts of information at any one point new learning will be introduced in stages.
Implement: At this stage the ‘Knowledge mats’ will be reviewed and children made aware of how they can be used to support learning.
Consideration will be given to each small step with regard to the questioning, scaffolding and assessment of understanding. Discussion regarding the identification of potential barriers to learning and how they may be overcome - linked to ‘Growth Mindset’
Impact: children will become increasingly independent in their learning as they are aware of strategies they can use when encountering difficulty. They can use knowledge mats as a reference for spellings, what is expected of them over the course of the study and growth mindset learning strategies.
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Independent Practice
Intent: Independent practice produces ‘overlearning’ - a necessary process for new material to be recalled automatically. This ensures no overloading of children’s working memory.
Implement: Effective modelling by the teacher will enable children to apply skills used in group work to their own learning journey.
Impact: Children’s resilience and self belief in their ability to overcome challenges and succeed will develop.