In many ways, for the whole of my career in education, there have been two main elements; the information giving curriculum and what I have always seen as the challenge curriculum. Some will see this as knowledge and skills, but, in the reality of the world, unless what you know can be used and applied in contexts where it is applicable or can be adapted to need, the acquisition of knowledge for it’s own sake, while laudable, could also become slightly debilitating.
It can be summed up as something to think about, to talk about and to show in an appropriate form.

Sharing knowledge is the bread and butter of every subject area. It requires planning over different timescale, allocated to different year groups and clearly identifying, so that it is progressive building, rather than an ad-hoc hiccupping.

With different age children, there will be some accommodation to the needs of the children, in terms of vocabulary and phrasing, but the essence of the sharing is to impart information that is essential and desirable in order that the children can then tackle pre-planned tasks. The sharing might have required a variety of modelling techniques, beyond the teacher voice; manipulable materials, visuals, as video or drawn elements or sound, music or other relevant material. This is often called dual coding.

Hopefully, this input is the stimulus for many of the learners to start to think independently for themselves, to generate their own questions and, given time to discuss with their peers, to assimilate the information more firmly. Learner feedback after the sharing of information is the key to teacher decision making; move on or revisit?

Task Setting (What’s the challenge?)

Limitations can be embedded in the activities that are given to children. In earlier posts, I’ve looked at task setting and it is to this that I’d want to return, as it is, without doubt, the determinant of progress. Real learning, at least to me, requires embedding what is known into overcoming a challenge and solving problems.

Much school learning can be seen as activities; doing, following a set of instructions, rather than applying knowledge and skills to challenging scenarios. This “recipe” approach to teaching can be effective in the right hands, as can all approaches, particularly where learners may be insecure and it is effectively remodelling in practice, however in the wrong hands it embeds a limitation, created by the task. A level x task, given to a level x learner, will produce level x learning. Task choice and challenge is therefore an essential skill.

Unpicking the level of challenge, the need for learners to think, to plan, to organise, to select, to determine routes and ideas rather than just follow instructions, is an important aspect.

Completing an activity sheet does not necessarily equate to learning. End to end activity sheets do not mean a scheme of work.

The process of learning has to be a dynamic interplay between the learner and the context, making active links between what is already known and what is being laid before them. To that end the interplay of the formal lessons, homework and (rehearsal) time between lessons would also appear, to me, to be critical. How much homework is an unrelated activity, just because homework has to be given? What if the challenge was continuous, so that homework became pre-thinking, preparation for the lesson, or a reflection on the learning outcomes of the current one?

Boxing everything would appear to embed potential limitations, in inexperienced hands, but sometimes in more experienced hands, as a result of the system. From that point of view, the diagram at the header is limited as it implies boxes rather than a dynamic.
 
Tasks (should) embed a wide range of challenges for learners, including:-

Some will be investigative, some problem-solving, some using and applying what is known into new areas. All should be challenging to thinking and have an impact on learner progress. The context for a practice task needs to be considered carefully.

• There will be the intellectual challenge; do they understand the task and the nature of the challenge? Can they perceive the strategies that they will need to fulfil the task?  Some of this will be determined by the teacher explanation of the task criteria, and what needs to be done to be successful, ie the success criteria, or what the teacher will be looking for.
• For some there will be the social challenge, such as the ability to cooperate with others in sharing available resources, organising, or being organised by, others.
• Some tasks will challenge independence. This, for the adults, is sometimes a difficult judgement call. Some tasks will need direct adult support, supervision and guidance to be successful. The amount and the detail of the adult support needs to be considered when reflecting on outcomes. What could the learners do for themselves?
• Some tasks will challenge learners to take what they know, to address the challenge with that baseline understanding, then to tackle new issues, identifying what they now need to know in order to make progress in the task.
• Some tasks will enable learners to identify areas where their learning is less secure and they may well ask for clarification or revisiting of earlier learning; in other words, the task is a “test”.

Tasks are often of the kind that I would call “Blue Peter” or “recipe” tasks.

Based on the idea of “Here’s one I made earlier”, they require a copyist approach; follow the instructions to the letter and it will turn out just like the model. This approach does occasionally have a place, but, with overuse, it can embed dependence. The approach is, by default, the teacher guide in the worksheet, with limited room for the child to really show their capabilities.

The best tasks make learners think, retrieve what they already know to bring to bear on the task in hand, to consider the framework and strategy for their investigation, the information and resources that they need, their personal and group organisation (as appropriate), how they will record their progress, the timescales available, so how they will use their time effectively. This approach fits equally well in formal lessons as well as in more open situations. Learner awareness of task needs is a central element of success.

Lessons?

Activities laid end to end are not a curriculum.

• Activity/busy-ness is not necessarily challenge.
• If task outcomes are general, one set for thirty, they will only impact positively on a narrow range of abilities.
• Task setting should enable learners to go beyond the activity. Not just, “You’ve finished early so here’s another activity”.
• Consider “the loneliness of the long-distance worksheet”.
• More open tasks enable learners to show their thinking ability and, possibly, a wider range of skills and knowledge.
• In open tasks, what you see can be greater than what you were looking for.
• Children often surprise teachers in learning situations.

If you want a thinking classroom, it’s essential that everyone is thinking, not just you, otherwise you may well be working twice as hard as the children, just to keep up the momentum.

Oh, it's a long, long while from May to December
But the days grow short when you reach September
And the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame
And I haven't got time for the waiting game

Last week, with my TSA/SCITT colleagues, I had a long discussion about strategic decisions that would have impact through 2018-19 and 19-20. In any organisation, it is essential to have a strategy that can be communicated throughout the participant group, enabling short term, situational decisions to be incorporated within the broader approach.

One decision, impacting on me, is that I will do one more year supporting next year’s Primary group of trainees. It’s my decision, but, looking at the longer term needs of the TSA/SCITT, they need to consider succession planning, and this enables them to do that within the year. Decisions in education are better made if there is a longer lead-in time. Last-minute decisions can become destabilising, if they become the norm.

In every school, plans for the coming year will be being made, staff appointed to vacancies, hopefully replacing one set of skills with similar or greater. A great frustration for any headteacher is having one or more vacancies in a period of supply famine. During 16 years of headship, on at least three occasions, the year started with me having to teach more or less full time, for up to half a term while adverts went out to scour the available teachers.

The pattern of each year, to some extent, is within school control; when to have parent evenings, report writing, meetings-developmental or organisational, presentations, assemblies (to include parents). Beyond that, teachers are better placed to teach if they have a coherent understanding of how the year will pan out, to ensure that everything that has to be covered is done.
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It was at the point where, as a whole school, we sat down, mapped out the school year to look at points of highest demand and also considered the idea of an annual overview curriculum plan, that teachers began to relax a little into the coming year. A relatively small investment in time had a huge impact on morale.

A “meet the teacher” parent evening was held in later September, to share the plans and make relationships. Time was offered to parents to make appointments during the term, instead of one staff meeting; three half hour slots after school.

Events such as Harvest Festival, Christmas and Easter, became extended assemblies, with everyone contributing a short piece, rather than Cecil B de Mille productions, more often sharing poetry or songs that had been learned as part of class time. It’s very easy to raise the general, whole school, stress levels with over-elaborate productions, but parents do like to be party to what their children are doing; they only have eyes for their child!

Just before February half term, we issued reports, probably equivalent to A5 in writing, with a short personal comment and key areas for further development, that became the areas for discussion at parent evenings to follow. It kept the subjects clear. Parents could respond and ask for other specific areas to be discussed. It allowed considered use of meetings, rather than reportage and response. If more than the ten minutes would be needed, then special appointments would be made, especially if the discussion needed the SENCo or another member of staff.

​Summer term reports were issued with an invitation to see the teacher if it was requested, rather than a formal meeting.

Closure days were rarely taken tacked onto holidays. After the initial day, the three subsequent days were used for development activity, with the fifth looking at the following year. Making a long weekend, especially in the summer term, proved popular with parents, as well as staff. Development periods were significantly more active from October to June, with one staff meeting being devoted to organisational matters, and three each month to subject development; sometimes single sessions spaced over time, sometimes a whole month devoted to one subject, depending on the lead’s request and possible trial activity in between.

By taking two finalist ITE trainees, some additional development time often became available, through paired staff release, at least for ten weeks.

Each year would be different, as a result of changing needs, of individuals or the school as a whole. Therefore, every year plan would have similarities, but also occasionally significant differences, for example if external curricular change was expected.

You do have to work with available skill sets. Supplemented by external expertise, either on a personal basis, through courses or one to one dialogue, or via expertise-led closures. It’s a case of fine tuning to the evident needs.

·         Overview planning allows for communication and a certain amount of diary control, both of which have a part to play in overall workload demands.
·         Teaching is demanding on a day to day basis.
·         To take account of broader needs requires careful planning.
·         The drip feed of external, often political statements, can be sufficient to become the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

There is pattern in time, in rhythm and rhyme; give thanks for a world full of pattern… but be ordered, organised and communicate.

In my experience in schools, the curriculum has always held centre stage; it’s the basis if what every teacher does. There seems to be an alternative narrative at the moment, where some seem to want to claim that somehow, and for some time, teachers have been doing otherwise.

When the National Curriculum emerged as a reality, in 1987, I was the deputy head of a First School. The first thing we did was to apportion each subject file to those with responsibility and for them to match what was being asked with what we provided and to identify the areas where adaptation, or gap filling, might be needed. This exercise identified 95% correspondence, with science being an area where topics were tweaked more than others. Subsequent incarnations of the NC required similar, relatively small, levels of adjustment.

So curriculum has been a central feature of school life throughout my career.

In the beginning, school level planning was largely topic allocation to each year group, to avoid some “nice” topics from appearing each year. Progression and objectives were a key part of deciding what to do and how it should be done.

The science programme in my first days, 1974, was based on Nuffield Science 5-13, history had Unsworth textbooks as a possible base. Every school appeared to have an Encyclopaedia Britannica, as a central feature of the library and atlases were the key resource for Geography. Our library was supplemented by the County library van visits, so pre-planning was needed to ensure that appropriate book resources were available. Topic work included “research skills”; how to use the textbooks, contents and index, to find information. Collecting knowledge was highlighted, sometimes used to create an “alphabet/glossary” of the topic, as a list or as a topic wall.

​When I became a Head, we developed the concept of the annual plan, which created two layers of information; curriculum coverage and what is now called interleaving, recalling earlier information and skills to use in the new context. An example might be letter writing, taught as a stand-alone in English, to be used later to write persuasively on a topic or perhaps review letters to an author, after a half-term of studying books by one author.  The annual plan also ensured that a broad curriculum was offered and that everything that had to be covered was covered.

This played also into a further development, of the two-page approach to writing, with one area providing the main writing task during the week; this could be reports or instruction-writing in science or other foundation subject. This approach developed out of the earlier National Writing Project, but within an exercise book format.

From this, the use of “flip sheets” supported the next layer of need, to identify specific areas where some individuals needed additional focus or support. This might be particular to a child’s special educational needs, which need to be kept continually in front of the child and supporting adults. It might also be specific areas which become apparent during work approaches, but which, if ignored, might create “holes” in knowledge or skill.

I keep coming back to this, as much of what we have done in schools ends up as a piece of writing, which is then the means by which security of achievement is judged by the teacher. To create a focus for each week enables cross-fertilisation of the knowledge curriculum within the context of the English curriculum demands.

Teacher judgement has always been a part of school life. It is, after all, that which underpins formative assessment and every subsequent decision regarding children. This now falls into the teacher standards 2,6 and 5, progress and outcomes, assessment and adaptation. These are the real sharp end of the teacher standards, where interaction, intervention and feedback support the developing learners, but outcomes also inform the teacher about the levels of security of each child, impacting on dynamics within and between lessons.

Progress, as a statement, has, to some extent, become slightly devalued in education parlance, and in terms of data judgements. It has always been the underpinning of conversations between teachers and parents, in particular, with, in days before National Curriculum levels, was as simple as comparing current performance with earlier outcomes, which is not quantified. Equally, judgements about appropriateness of the outcomes for a particular year group will depend on experience within the key stage.

In 2013/4, I wrote a piece about levelness becoming de facto yearness, with the proposed, now current, curriculum detailing what should be taught in each year group.

If we assume that the whole is shared by the teacher within the year, teacher decisions will be based on security; how well children demonstrate that they can use and apply, preferably independently, that which they have been taught. If one yearness of teaching is the norm and a child achieves 100% of this independently, have they made one year of progress; more or less?

If they don’t achieve 100%, have they made less than one year’s progress and what is done about those areas that are less secure? This question has been part of my whole career; what to do with children as they transition into a new year group with identifiable continuing needs.

This returns us to the flip sheets, where continuing needs can be recorded to be actioned in future activity. Not to record this, in my opinion, is creating a situation where the receiving teacher has to find the gaps for themselves, which helps no-one, least of all the learner.

We need simple systems that support learners throughout their school careers.
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A high-quality, broad curriculum is an entitlement of all learners. Continual interaction, intervention and developmental feedback is right and proper.
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Recording continual needs creates an aide memoire for both learner and adults. That way might support continual development, or progress, however small. 
 

Teachers are the lead thinkers and decision makers in a classroom:-

•             They need to know the subject at hand, which may be different for a graduate specialist in a Secondary school compared to a Primary generalist, responsible for a range of subjects, where some personal subject knowledge will be stronger than others.
•             They will have ordered the curriculum into discrete themes, topics or programmes of study.
•             They order and organise the coherence of their plans over a known timescale, ensure that classroom and the resources for learning support the learning proposed.
•             They know their children, to varying degrees, depending on their contact time through the week, but they are trained to understand learner development through the age range.
•             Their plans seek to match the needs of the subject with the needs of the children, providing appropriate challenge to all abilities.
•             They plan learning over a timescale to ensure a dynamic is established which fully engages learners, in and out of school, and assures the imparting of a particular body of knowledge.
•             They create tasks appropriate to the challenge, with an understanding of the subsequent developmental stages of the learning, so that by engaging with the learners while on task, they are able to guide and support their developing understanding.
•             They ensure that teacher input gets across the essential information on which the lesson is to be founded, through a variety of means, which are enhanced by the availability of in-class ICT facilities.
•             They ensure that behaviour allows learning to take place.
•             They interact with outcomes, orally in class and in writing after the lesson, while marking books. They are constantly making judgements, on an individual, group or class level.
•             They use the outcomes as new reference points against which to plan the next steps.
•             And they add broader value to schools in many other ways………………….
•             They undertake personal CPD that enhances their practice.

If teacher-think is the essential component of enhanced learning opportunities, there needs to be consideration of the barriers to this thinking. There will be more for each list.

Personal barriers:-
•             Subject or pedagogic knowledge.
•             Extended experience with a specific age group or ability range. (New school, new year group)
•             Personal order, organisation, record keeping, reflective practice.
•             Self-confidence, possible status with learners.

External:-
•             Demands for planning (thinking) in a particular format.
•             School specific, preferred approaches to teaching and learning.
•             School specific schemes, with limited opportunity to adapt to class need.
•             School organisation demanding whole year approaches.
•             School resources, including the availability of support.
•             Work space limiting some approaches.
•             Regular changes to practice to accord with external influences.
•             Local context issues, such as parent demands, children arriving at school with social or personal issues, behavioural distractions.
•             Changes at National level, particularly where there is an extended period of uncertainty about policy interpretation.

Fear:-
The greatest impact on teacher-think is the fear of being judged as ineffective and found wanting. There is a need to quality-assure teaching and learning is a school. It is naïve to think otherwise, but the systems in place can add to the stress of being observed, both at school and inspection level.

The value of feedback from an observation is to retell the lesson narrative, highlighting significant points, as a basis for discussion and development. Internal observations should always happen on this basis, not as a numeric judgement, in the same way that feedback to learners to support future learning is better as description than an arbitrary grade.

Teachers work within human systems, which can appear sometimes to be less than humane. The best systems look out for the individuals who make up the team, providing support and guidance to colleagues in the same way they do to children. Even the best practitioners can suffer a dip in performance when life offers personal challenges. Thoughtful, reflective management breeds thoughtful, reflective, autonomous teachers and independence in learners. 
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Teaching is a great job, but free the teachers to think, that’s what they are paid to do.
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Further blogs on thinking teachers:-
https://chrischiversthinks.weebly.com/blog-thinking-aloud/teacher-think-more-metacognition
https://chrischiversthinks.weebly.com/blog-thinking-aloud/teachers-think
https://chrischiversthinks.weebly.com/blog-thinking-aloud/permission-to-think
https://chrischiversthinks.weebly.com/blog-thinking-aloud/teach-teacher-teachest