Curriculum Primer 5 — How should the curriculum be organised?

This is the fifth in a short series that aims to support middle and senior leaders in improving the curriculum within specific subject areas in their schools. You can find a video explainer on this question below:

How should middle leaders go about organising the lessons within their curriculum? The important takeaway from this session is that sequencing is less importance than coherence, i.e. making sure that there is one big idea running as a thread through each sequence of lessons.

I have written up some suggested curriculum questions to be asked by senior leaders to middle leaders below. For each question, I have included examples and non-examples to illustrate what makes for effective and ineffective curriculum thinking.

NB: in the following text, the phrase ‘Big Ideas’ is used throughout. This could be used interchangeably with certain other phrases, e.g. ‘core concepts’, ‘subsumers’, etc.

Big Ideas — Some Suggested Questions for Subject Leads

How is your curriculum currently organised? Is each unit centred on one or more big ideas? Can you show me examples?

• Non-example — MFL. Our curriculum is organised in terms of topics: family, house and home, school, etc. We make sure all of the vocabulary and grammatical concepts we want to cover are distributed within these contexts.
• Example — History. Our curriculum is organised around big ideas. For example, we want students to develop a deep understanding of the concept of revolution. We introduce this idea by studying the Glorious Revolution in Y7, the French Revolution in Y9, and the Russian Revolution in Y10. Each of the lessons in these sequences aims at developing an understanding of this big idea.

What do you think are the big ideas in your subject? How are these distinct from the most important facts?

• Non-example — Maths: Our focus is on ensuring our students are proficient. In the fractions unit, we teach students to identify the numerator and denominator, then we train them in the methods required to manipulate fractions, e.g. multiplying the two numerators, multiplying the two denominators, then simplifying.
• Example — Maths: One of the most important ideas in maths is proportionality. Young children find this difficult (see Piaget’s conservation experiment here), so it is something we need to revisit at every key stage. When we teach fractions, ratio, percentages, etc, we always explicitly draw students’ attention to the way they are related in terms of the concept of proportionality.

How do the big ideas develop through your curriculum? Is your model for progress in your subject centred on the big ideas?

• Non-example — English: At KS3, our aim is to stimulate a love of reading in our students. For this reason, we introduce students to texts we think they will enjoy reading and that relate to their everyday lives. At KS4, we study An Inspector Calls, Animal Farm, and the Power and Conflict anthology. These are the texts that will come up in their Literature exams.
• Example — Geography: One big idea in geography is the idea that certain observable natural hazards (e.g. volcanoes, earthquakes) can be explained by tectonic plate theory, i.e. the motion of tectonic plates over the Earth’s surface. At KS3, we aim to give students a qualitative understanding of this concept by explaining it in general terms, e.g. how earthquakes can be caused by the subduction of oceanic plates at destructive plate boundaries. At KS4, our aim is for students to be able to apply the knowledge acquired at KS3 by explaining certain concrete examples in terms of this concept, e.g. why there are a lot of volcanoes / earthquakes in Japan. For students who wish to study geography at KS5, we aim to teach them how to relate their understanding of this concept to other big ideas within the subject, e.g. relating the risk of natural hazards in a certain country to its economic development.

Have you got enough big ideas? Do these big ideas adequately tie together every sequence of lessons within your curriculum?

• Non-example — History: There are two big ideas in history: power and conflict. Ultimately, everything comes back to these two ideas.
• Example — Science: For every sequence of lessons, we have identified the big idea(s) that we want to embed. It is important that these are referred back to in every lesson within a sequence, e.g. in a lesson on evaporation, we would refer back to the big ideas a) that all matter is made up of particles, and b) that temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy of particles.

Are the big ideas you have listed widely recognised as being important? In other words, are these big ideas widely accepted within your subject community? If so, why?

• Non-example — Geography: To identify the big ideas, we took what we thought were the most important topics in the specification and made them into a list. We make sure to put an icon on the title slide of every lesson so that students know which big idea they’re currently studying.
• Example — English: To identify the big ideas of English literature, we used our own knowledge of the history of literature along with our readings from the English subject community. For example, following John Sutherland, we believe that the idea of the creation myth, either of the species or a nation-state, is essential to understanding the early literature of a language; we disagree with Alka Sehgal Cuthbert’s assertion that all literature must be understood in purely aesthetic terms. Hence, we teach a unit on epics, including The Odyssey, Beowulf, and The Prelude, situating each within the broader political events of the time and hence showing why each was considered so significant.

Have you framed your subject’s big ideas within a broader conception of what the discipline is? If the big ideas can be thought of as the substantive knowledge of your discipline, then have you made clear to students what constitutes disciplinary knowledge in your subject, i.e. the rules that govern how the big ideas can be related to one another?

• Non-example — Art: The big ideas in art are broken down according to the formal elements. For example, to introduce the sequence of lessons on ‘colour’, we show students the primary colours and how they can be combined to make other colours. During the sequence of lessons on ‘line’, we first practise drawing straight lines, then curves, then dashed lines, and so on.
• Example — Art: Our curriculum is based on one overarching idea, that art is an ongoing practice in which humans create images in order, ultimately, to gain knowledge of themselves. We introduce this idea with a short introductory unit presenting students with a brief history of art from ancient times to the present day, before zooming in and looking at various works of art more closely. We organise our curriculum according to the formal elements, explaining how artists have used each element (e.g. colour, line, texture) in terms of the broader conception outlined at the beginning. So, rather than treating an element like colour as something entirely separate to elements like line and texture, we make it explicit to students that each is part of a single enterprise, i.e. that each can be used by the artist to create an image that gives us a better understanding of ourselves.

Analysing a sequence of lessons — to what extent do big ideas run through?

What is the big idea that runs through this sequence of lessons?

• Non-example — Science: This unit is about the history of microscopes and telescopes. Through this theme, we cover a range of ideas from biology, chemistry and physics, including cells, magnification, lenses, refraction of light, the eye, respiration, chemical reactions, telescopes, the solar system, and cosmology.
• Example — English: This Y7 unit is an introduction to the idea of form. By studying a range of sonnets, we will demonstrate to students how the form of a poem can be used to convey meaning. This will be built upon in Y9, when we study poems encompassing a broader range of forms in order to develop the same big idea in greater depth.

Does whatever students will learn in these lessons depend on understanding one big idea?

• Non-example — MFL: During this unit, students will learn a range of vocabulary all linked to the theme of house and home. During each lesson, students will work on a different aspect of grammar, as specified in the progression model document that accompanies the curriculum.
• Example — History: During this unit, students will learn about the reign of Henry II and his complicated relationship with Thomas Becket. The purpose of teaching this period of history is to introduce students to the broader historical concept of the relationship between church and state, the big idea that underpins every lesson within the sequence.

How does the sequence of lessons support students in developing the big idea?

• Non-example — Geography: When teaching students about the types of rocks that inform physical landscapes in the UK, we begin with sedimentary rocks, because these are likely to be most familiar to our students. We then learn about igneous rocks, then metamorphic rocks, then about the different forms of erosion and weathering.
• Example — Geography: The big idea in this unit is the rock cycle, i.e. the idea that each type of rock moves and changes over time in a cyclical process. To support students in understanding this big idea, we first teach students how igneous rocks are formed from the cooling of magma below the Earth’s surface, then how these igneous rocks can be weathered and eroded, then how these smaller pieces contribute to the formation of sedimentary rocks, then how these sedimentary rocks can be changed into metamorphic rocks under intense heat and pressure, and finally how metamorphic rocks can be pushed back into the mantle, causing the cycle to begin again.

Is the big idea underpinning each lesson made explicit to students, a) at the beginning of the sequence, and b) at some point during each lesson?

• Non-example — History: The big ideas that connect everything students learn about the French Revolution are power and democracy. To illustrate this to students, we include icons on the title slide of each lesson representing these two ideas (see below).

Example — Geography: The first lesson in the sequence presents a brief overview of the rock cycle as a whole. At the beginning of each subsequent lesson, we ‘zoom out’ to show the system as a whole, i.e. the big idea of the rock cycle, before ‘zooming in’ to examine one part of the system, e.g. sedimentary rocks. At the end of the sequence, we ask students to complete an extended writing task describing the entire cycle. This means that it is clear in students’ minds throughout the sequence how each type of rock relates to others in the cycle.