Thanks to Tim Taylor, @imagineinquiry, I agreed to look back over my career at what has at various times been called topic work, or thematic study or cross curricular learning. In many ways, the title doesn’t matter, as the principle is that some aspects of learning are worked together to make a coherent whole. To comment, please visit the IQM blog.
Put simply, classroom learning is children, context, engagement, guidance and adaptation, evaluation of outcomes. The whole captured within communication.
Remembering always the maxim that education( life) is a journey not a destination. (Ralph Waldo Emerson, an American essayist, poet, and leader of the Transcendentalist movement in the early nineteenth century.)
To me, education is the making sense of experience, captured in this diagram, from which I will no doubt be accused of being “Dewey-eyed”. Planning for learning is the bread and butter of teaching, more fully explored here.
Put simply, classroom learning is children, context, engagement, guidance and adaptation, evaluation of outcomes. The whole captured within communication.
Remembering always the maxim that education( life) is a journey not a destination. (Ralph Waldo Emerson, an American essayist, poet, and leader of the Transcendentalist movement in the early nineteenth century.)
To me, education is the making sense of experience, captured in this diagram, from which I will no doubt be accused of being “Dewey-eyed”. Planning for learning is the bread and butter of teaching, more fully explored here.
It has been a long time, but the essence of teaching and learning is very much like it always has been. There is an imperative to ensure coverage of the curriculum, in a way that allows all children to access ideas and to make progress across the year. Knowing the children is still central to this. To wok in any other way, ignoring the children and just concentrating on the curriculum, will inevitably lead to learning casualties.
We need to enthuse our learners to be significantly interested in the world around them, to engage using all their senses, utilising any prior knowledge to seek to further develop their understanding. Subjects are the means by which we explore the world, to define and refine our thinking. Because we examine them, they can become ends in themselves, but, a child who receives an enriching curricular experience has things to think about, to talk about and to write about. They can engage with counting and measuring within these encounters, within social contexts, based around cooperation, supporting the broader PSHE expectations.
I would start by saying that bad topic work is bad teaching, just the same as any other bad teaching, but, where it is done well adds significant value to learning, by creating a deeper texture. Where it falls down, like any teaching, is when disparate activities are chunked end to end in the name of cohesion, but the connecting narrative is so weak, that no connections are made.
The world’s a big place and the classroom is a small box. The ability to bring the world to the classroom has altered out of all recognition, with the advent of significant ICT. It’s also very easy to forget the real world outside the windows, where the locality holds the secrets of history, geography and the natural sciences. All capable of being experienced, explored and explained by enthusiastic learners, coming to the experiences for the first time.
Topic approaches appeal to lateral thinking teachers, with a broad range of interests. In my experience, more linear thinkers struggle to comprehend the complexities, seek the simplicities, including much borrowing from others, and struggle to maintain learner interest. For the lateral thinker, the world’s your oyster. But, and it is a big but, your thinking has to focus on the essentials of the prescribed curriculum. Again, this causes a difficulty, in that the lateral thinker might see the prescribed as the essential core around which other interesting elements can be woven, whereas a linear thinker may concentrate on delivering the essentials.
Training to become a teacher from 1971-74 at St Luke’s College, Exeter, after a period working as a lab assistant with ICI on biological projects, I naturally started with science as my main subject, very linear in many ways, although the approach was inquiry based. The previous head of science, one Edward Turner, had returned from a sabbatical year in which he wrote a book with George Martin of Northampton College of Education entitled Environmental Studies. I managed to get hold of a copy a year ago, just as a memento. An opportunity arose at the end of my first year to transfer to the Environmental Studies group, which I took and suddenly I was immersed in a cross curricular, analytical, rigorous series of studies with the world around us as the workshop. Within this approach, some subjects were the enquiry route, while other were seen as the communication routes. The whole derived extensively from the Plowden report. (1967)
In seeking to offer insights into this approach, I’ll make reference to other posts which appear on the IQM website, which are offered there as food for thought, rather than exhortations to copy. The beauty of the topic approach is that every teacher can develop the way forward in ways that harness their own strengths and the available resources, both physical and human; these can, however, also provide the contextual limitations.
I’ve always viewed topic work as a form of project management, akin to the building of a house. This gives rise to the analyse-plan-do-review-record idea that permeates a number of other posts.
The whole has to be described so that the journey can be mapped with care, including any interesting diversions. There has to be a defined beginning and end, with a clear series of activities between that create the narrative of the story being told. Some teachers are excellent storytellers and can ramble on for ever, embellishing and developing to the point where the topic runs out of steam and leads to an anti-climax. There is also the limitation of the 39 week school year and a certain amount of information to get across.
In my early days of teaching, the curriculum map looked like this and is written about as Curriculum Reminiscences.
We need to enthuse our learners to be significantly interested in the world around them, to engage using all their senses, utilising any prior knowledge to seek to further develop their understanding. Subjects are the means by which we explore the world, to define and refine our thinking. Because we examine them, they can become ends in themselves, but, a child who receives an enriching curricular experience has things to think about, to talk about and to write about. They can engage with counting and measuring within these encounters, within social contexts, based around cooperation, supporting the broader PSHE expectations.
I would start by saying that bad topic work is bad teaching, just the same as any other bad teaching, but, where it is done well adds significant value to learning, by creating a deeper texture. Where it falls down, like any teaching, is when disparate activities are chunked end to end in the name of cohesion, but the connecting narrative is so weak, that no connections are made.
The world’s a big place and the classroom is a small box. The ability to bring the world to the classroom has altered out of all recognition, with the advent of significant ICT. It’s also very easy to forget the real world outside the windows, where the locality holds the secrets of history, geography and the natural sciences. All capable of being experienced, explored and explained by enthusiastic learners, coming to the experiences for the first time.
Topic approaches appeal to lateral thinking teachers, with a broad range of interests. In my experience, more linear thinkers struggle to comprehend the complexities, seek the simplicities, including much borrowing from others, and struggle to maintain learner interest. For the lateral thinker, the world’s your oyster. But, and it is a big but, your thinking has to focus on the essentials of the prescribed curriculum. Again, this causes a difficulty, in that the lateral thinker might see the prescribed as the essential core around which other interesting elements can be woven, whereas a linear thinker may concentrate on delivering the essentials.
Training to become a teacher from 1971-74 at St Luke’s College, Exeter, after a period working as a lab assistant with ICI on biological projects, I naturally started with science as my main subject, very linear in many ways, although the approach was inquiry based. The previous head of science, one Edward Turner, had returned from a sabbatical year in which he wrote a book with George Martin of Northampton College of Education entitled Environmental Studies. I managed to get hold of a copy a year ago, just as a memento. An opportunity arose at the end of my first year to transfer to the Environmental Studies group, which I took and suddenly I was immersed in a cross curricular, analytical, rigorous series of studies with the world around us as the workshop. Within this approach, some subjects were the enquiry route, while other were seen as the communication routes. The whole derived extensively from the Plowden report. (1967)
In seeking to offer insights into this approach, I’ll make reference to other posts which appear on the IQM website, which are offered there as food for thought, rather than exhortations to copy. The beauty of the topic approach is that every teacher can develop the way forward in ways that harness their own strengths and the available resources, both physical and human; these can, however, also provide the contextual limitations.
I’ve always viewed topic work as a form of project management, akin to the building of a house. This gives rise to the analyse-plan-do-review-record idea that permeates a number of other posts.
The whole has to be described so that the journey can be mapped with care, including any interesting diversions. There has to be a defined beginning and end, with a clear series of activities between that create the narrative of the story being told. Some teachers are excellent storytellers and can ramble on for ever, embellishing and developing to the point where the topic runs out of steam and leads to an anti-climax. There is also the limitation of the 39 week school year and a certain amount of information to get across.
In my early days of teaching, the curriculum map looked like this and is written about as Curriculum Reminiscences.
As an example, history started as My story, based on storyboards created with a series of photos, then developed into His or Her story, with reference to parents and grandparents. Local walks to look at houses of interest started a link between History and Geography, with sketch mapping, drawing in situ or photos being taken (development time, much easier now?). Parents and grandparents came to tell their own stories, recorded onto c45, 60 or 90 tapes to be replayed and reflected upon. For homework, children were asked to telephone grandparents to ask a series of questions. Timelines were created throughout, so historical perspectives were constantly being revisited, as knowledge was added. And we got back to the Victorians with photograph based family trees, together with the accompanying narrative.
Within each topic area, allocated to a year group, medium term plans would be drawn up, to establish the direction of study.
On becoming a headteacher, I established the credentials of the school through topic based enquiry learning. It needed some pulling together from a much looser, and less successful, structure, at least as far as outcomes were concerned. It had been a case of nice activities, with nice outcomes, none of which was greater than level 3, even in year six. Some significant learning was being missed. In order to do this we based thinking on this model, which allowed broader consideration of teaching and learning needs than that prescribed by the National Curriculum, which had not long emerged.
Within each topic area, allocated to a year group, medium term plans would be drawn up, to establish the direction of study.
On becoming a headteacher, I established the credentials of the school through topic based enquiry learning. It needed some pulling together from a much looser, and less successful, structure, at least as far as outcomes were concerned. It had been a case of nice activities, with nice outcomes, none of which was greater than level 3, even in year six. Some significant learning was being missed. In order to do this we based thinking on this model, which allowed broader consideration of teaching and learning needs than that prescribed by the National Curriculum, which had not long emerged.
This was then interpreted into a series of “Topic Specs”, which articulated the essential aspects which had to be covered, the potential for additional study, a complete list of available resources in the school and within the surrounding area. In this way, like a set of playing cards, the topics could be done in any order and, if a teacher could see a way to weave two or more topics together within an overarching theme, that was fine. All topic specs were discussed with County specialist advisers, every two years, to establish and maintain their validity and to offer the school subject manager some personal CPD.
Each teacher, when they were allocated their classes in the summer term, were also given the pack of their subject specs for the year group, with a need to develop an annual plan as an overall statement of intent for the year. The annual plan also included the expectation that weeks one and two would be a personal topic, to allow the teacher to get to know the children well and fully establish expectations. On the second Friday, we had a closure which, after the admin, was devoted to planning the detail of the rest of the term as medium term plans and the first topic in detail, based on knowing the children, rather than as a prediction. This style of planning also allowed trips to be booked and put in diaries, never as an afterthought.
With apologies for the poor printing, an example annual plan is shown below. It should be clear that there were lead subjects to ensure the curriculum coverage, with English and Maths potential within each topic fully developed. Where this was not possible, both subjects were taught as discrete elements. The same principle applied to all subjects.
Each teacher, when they were allocated their classes in the summer term, were also given the pack of their subject specs for the year group, with a need to develop an annual plan as an overall statement of intent for the year. The annual plan also included the expectation that weeks one and two would be a personal topic, to allow the teacher to get to know the children well and fully establish expectations. On the second Friday, we had a closure which, after the admin, was devoted to planning the detail of the rest of the term as medium term plans and the first topic in detail, based on knowing the children, rather than as a prediction. This style of planning also allowed trips to be booked and put in diaries, never as an afterthought.
With apologies for the poor printing, an example annual plan is shown below. It should be clear that there were lead subjects to ensure the curriculum coverage, with English and Maths potential within each topic fully developed. Where this was not possible, both subjects were taught as discrete elements. The same principle applied to all subjects.
The advantages were that English was English, whether undertaken in English or within a topic area, so Speaking and Listening were developed through cooperative ad collaborative group discussion activities, writing derived from topic areas would be treated a writing and received appropriate feedback and marking. All writing was done in a writing book, and, as necessary, drafted to a point where it could be published in some way.
Equally, maths was maths. Much of the measures aspects of maths can be accommodated within cross curricular themes. Number and data can derive from many also. But, the teachers were always cogniscent of the need to ensure a narrative in maths, so some aspects would be discrete, usually taught ahead of the need to use and apply the skill.
When I stopped as head, our English, maths and science SATs regularly were above 85%, not 100%, but the feedback from our secondary colleagues was that our children were enthused to learn, and went on to success in that phase. I have since met quite a number of parents who have told me that their children went on to get firsts at degree level, so the foundations must have been laid. Not bad from an “off Leigh Park” school, 60% of intake. (Leigh Park was described as the largest council housing estate in Europe) One feature of this approach was the number of children who went home and found things out for themselves to bring in and share. Home activity was guided rather than set as must do activities. It was more a case of, “Go home and see if you can find out…” with all contributions valued as discussion aids.
My contention is, in all planning, that a long term overview supports the medium term, which in term support the short term. Keeping an eye on time meant that topics had a defined end time, with a certain amount to be covered within that time.
I’m working with an infant school, looking at planning and have developed this diagram to support the phases of thinking. It seeks to encapsulate all the above, as well as ways in which a range of issues can be embedded.
Equally, maths was maths. Much of the measures aspects of maths can be accommodated within cross curricular themes. Number and data can derive from many also. But, the teachers were always cogniscent of the need to ensure a narrative in maths, so some aspects would be discrete, usually taught ahead of the need to use and apply the skill.
When I stopped as head, our English, maths and science SATs regularly were above 85%, not 100%, but the feedback from our secondary colleagues was that our children were enthused to learn, and went on to success in that phase. I have since met quite a number of parents who have told me that their children went on to get firsts at degree level, so the foundations must have been laid. Not bad from an “off Leigh Park” school, 60% of intake. (Leigh Park was described as the largest council housing estate in Europe) One feature of this approach was the number of children who went home and found things out for themselves to bring in and share. Home activity was guided rather than set as must do activities. It was more a case of, “Go home and see if you can find out…” with all contributions valued as discussion aids.
My contention is, in all planning, that a long term overview supports the medium term, which in term support the short term. Keeping an eye on time meant that topics had a defined end time, with a certain amount to be covered within that time.
I’m working with an infant school, looking at planning and have developed this diagram to support the phases of thinking. It seeks to encapsulate all the above, as well as ways in which a range of issues can be embedded.
It has been a long time, but the essence of teaching and learning is very much like it always has been. There is an imperative to ensure coverage of the curriculum, in a way that allows all children to access ideas and to make progress across the year. Knowing the children is still central to this. To wok in any other way, ignoring the children and just concentrating on the curriculum, will inevitably lead to learning casualties.
We need to enthuse our learners to be significantly interested in the world around them, to engage using all their senses, utilising any prior knowledge to seek to further develop their understanding. Subjects are the means by which we explore the world, to define and refine our thinking. Because we examine them, they can become ends in themselves, but, a child who receives an enriching curricular experience has things to think about, to talk about and to write about. They can engage with counting and measuring within these encounters, within social contexts, based around cooperation, supporting the broader PSHE expectations.
But most of all, I’d argue that, looked at this way, it allows teachers and children to begin to break out of some of the curricular and timetabled boxes that have come to dominate.
We need to enthuse our learners to be significantly interested in the world around them, to engage using all their senses, utilising any prior knowledge to seek to further develop their understanding. Subjects are the means by which we explore the world, to define and refine our thinking. Because we examine them, they can become ends in themselves, but, a child who receives an enriching curricular experience has things to think about, to talk about and to write about. They can engage with counting and measuring within these encounters, within social contexts, based around cooperation, supporting the broader PSHE expectations.
But most of all, I’d argue that, looked at this way, it allows teachers and children to begin to break out of some of the curricular and timetabled boxes that have come to dominate.
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