2. Isn’t there already a curriculum?
In the previous article, I shared my frustrations with the responses of Year 11 students to science exam questions. Many were either lacking in basic knowledge or unable to apply their knowledge to new situations.
To counter this, we did lots of quizzes and modelled answers using thought structures like ‘if … then …’ sentences. The success of this approach got me thinking about what it is we actually do in the classroom. And what are we trying to achieve? These questions require deep thinking about pedagogy and curriculum respectively.
I’m fortunate enough to have been given the opportunity to think about these questions in my new role at Bobby Moore Academy. My job is to oversee the development of a science curriculum that runs from Year 7 all the way to Year 11 and beyond. In time, my role may well cover primary school science teaching too.
Whenever I tell people outside of teaching (and even some within the profession) that I’ve been given the task of designing a science curriculum, I’m met with incredulity.
‘Isn’t there already a curriculum?’ they ask, referring to the National Curriculum and exam specifications.
In a sense, they’re right. The National Curriculum and its exam-focused offspring give a broad overview of the core ideas that make up a decent school-level knowledge in each discipline.
Two categories of knowledge
In the sciences, most of these documents are taken up with what Christine Counsell describes as substantive knowledge, facts and rules that act as starting points when drawing scientific conclusions. Helium atoms have two protons; pressure is inversely proportional to volume; respiration happens in the mitochondria. It is information like this that we usually think of when we talk about knowledge.
There also tend to be a few pages devoted to so-called disciplinary knowledge, the ideas which lead to an understanding of how knowledge is created and what the typical criteria of truth are within a discipline. Cause and effect; the use of models; mathematics as the language of nature: these must also be assimilated if students are to gain a thorough understanding of the scientific domains.
Are exam specifications enough?
So why can’t we just print out a copy of the spec for every student and let them get on with it? The information is all there after all. Further to that, we have textbooks, worksheets, vast online libraries which all express these ideas in different forms. Don’t these make up the curriculum?
In a sense, they do. It’s important to codify the complexities of scientific thinking in terms of some of the fundamental propositions, methods and assumptions that make up the scientific disciplines. Yet reading through and memorising this content would leave someone a long way short of thinking scientifically.
This is precisely what happened in the UK however. As pressure around exams increased, teachers found themselves increasingly guiding students towards memorising specifications.
Such teaching to the test was endemic. The steady improvement in GCSE grades ran concurrently to a stagnation in PISA scores. Students were not learning the knowledge that granted them access to the disciplines; they were learning how to pass GCSE exams.
Pedagogy vs curriculum
Some have made this observation and argued subsequently that teaching content or facts is pointless. My headteacher at a previous school (who is now in charge of a MAT) made a case for such an approach when I joined.
He believed that teaching science was simply a matter of teaching the scientific method: “that way the students can just do experiments in order to find everything out for themselves,” he reasoned. He was against the idea of subject specialisms (biology, chemistry, physics), and strongly committed to inter-disciplinary projects at KS3. I will outline the problems of adopting such an approach in a later article in this series.
His was an extreme case, but isn’t there an argument that the pedagogy of thought structures like ‘if … then …’ sentences is sufficient? If students can think logically, then surely they can work everything else out from there? If this were true, we wouldn’t need a curriculum at all. Pedagogy would be sufficient.
Another school of thought takes the opposite view. Deriving much of their inspiration from E.D. Hirsch, this group argues that the ability to reason arises principally from having a broad range of background knowledge. Their view is that modelling ‘if … then …’ sentences is pointless unless the students have such background knowledge.
For example, if a teacher asks a student to explain the motor effect in physics, the student first needs to know that when a current passes through a wire a magnetic field becomes associated with it. Provided the student has enough knowledge of this kind, they would argue, the ‘if … then …’ sentences will come naturally. Thus, the how of pedagogy is overrated; the what of curriculum is what matters.
Knowledge vs skills
What unites both sides of this debate is a belief in the knowledge-skills dichotomy, that there are facts for students to learn (current-carrying wires have a magnetic field associated with them) and skills for them to practise (writing ‘if … then …’ sentences). Later in the series, I will argue that this distinction is erroneous, and that an acceptance of it is detrimental to what goes on in the classroom.
This is part of a series on Developing a Science Curriculum at Bobby Moore Academy.
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