Curriculum Planning: Understanding by Design

 

Statement of inquiry: Knowledge, Skills and Understanding

Students learn a body of knowledge and demonstrate their understanding by using it in a real life context. I imagine, broadly speaking, that this is the aim of most school curricula. Although the secondary curriculum might feel abstract and esoteric to some students, I trust that educators aren’t gathering in a classroom after a day of challenging Neil about his nail varnish or Estelle about her chair swinging habit and scheming: “Right Folks! Let’s come up with a scheme of learning for year 8 that will feel like masticating a mountain of butter-free, gluten-free, wholegrain scones. Let’s suck out the joy and tell the kids it’s good for them. Buahaha!.” So why do so many students still experience swathes of secondary education as some obstacle course devised to get in the way of the true richness of 21st century childhood? Why balance equations when the deep marrow of life can be found in slinging animated birds at pigs or breaking your collarbone while flipping off a longboard? Implementing MYP gives us an opportunity to revisit our curriculum and address some of these questions. I’m not saying that MYP will lead to a school where eye-rolling and the spectacular glassy eyed are-you-trying-to-kill-me-with-boredom stare become a distant memory but it does invite us to spend some time considering how we can meet students away from, or even in, their unique twenty-first century worlds. MYP curriculum planning is informed by the principles of Understanding By Design©  UbD is founded on understanding and transfer: a curriculum where student understanding is assessed by whether they can transfer knowledge and skills from a taught unit and apply them in a ‘real life’ context. This approach invites teachers to focus on wide interdisciplinary concepts before they populate the curriculum with the specific knowledge and skills they want to teach. Although this initially might feel nebulous, it actually forces you to be very selective about curriculum content. Being selective about content is hard: I could fill the entire KS3 curriculum with English and it would be awesome! There might be some complaints from the STEM industry and the healthcare system may suffer, but think of the poetry! The great tv! The films we would write…. As subject specialists, we dream of wandering through the Great Forests of Literature, the Astral Planes of Physics or the Remote Kingdoms of History hand in hand with our students filled with awe and wonder. The reality we’re presented with is a small suburban garden (filled with excitable monkeys). So, when we start planning subject specific curricula, we have no choice but to prune. Hard. And to deal with the monkeys. We need to be asking which concepts in our subject are most worth understanding and how do we communicate these effectively? And that’s not an easy task because unavoidably, we will have to leave so much out. UbD curriculum planning advises us that if we want to prepare our students to tend the complex biosphere of human endeavour, we need to be thinking more widely than our own subject areas. Are we teaching knowledge and skills for their own sake or as a means to bigger ends? If we have no idea what the future holds, ultimately knowledge is most useful to students when it is properly understood and can be transferred to various, unpredictable contexts. For example, if my teaching of Hamlet does not help a student to read and understand more widely, then they are limited entirely to Hamlet. And though Hamlet is not a bad text to be limited to, if we want to nurture inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world, students need to be able extend their learning beyond my classroom and explore deep and wide. This is why MYP encourages teachers to consider curriculum planning in a more interdisciplinary way: how does an insight into statistics help a student deconstruct a political speech? How does knowledge of respiration help students become better athletes? How does an exploration of Amazonian bio-diversity inform the choice of materials when designing a bookcase? What students learn in geography can be useful in design. Thinking across subject areas deepens knowledge, understanding and recall. Obviously we need to teach our subjects well and there will be many strong opinions about whether we prioritise Waterloo over World War Two, Shakespeare over Austen or fractions over trigonometry. However, whatever we decide about content, with its focus on concepts, MYP urges us to remember that ultimately we have a responsibility to transfer the tools for creating knowledge into the hands of our students. And not just to teach them the stuff we like (though there’s room for that too).

Authentic assessment: Understanding and Transfer

The I first time I heard the term ‘authentic assessment’, it scared the heebee jeebies out of me. I teach fifteen year olds to deconstruct metre in Victorian poetry. How on earth am I supposed to create a ‘real world’ situation where an analysis of heroic couplets is useful? I kind of spiralled… We need a covid vaccine urgently! This is a crisis in world history! Don’t worry in this time of great confusion! English surely will find a solution! I am an expert in Victorian verse “That’s f*****g pointless,” I hear people curse…. MYP demands that we root our highfalutin abstract ideas in real-life contexts: it asks us to holds our curriculum choices to account. Thus my job, as an English MYP teacher might be to create an assessment where students are able to understand (amongst other things) the value of rhythm: to be convinced that what they are learning is useful beyond the school gates. And to be honest, if I don’t believe that it’s actually useful, why am I teaching it? To show them how awesomely clever and knowledgeable I am? I profoundly believe that an understanding of language and how it is used to shape the world has real life applications. Now, more than ever, we need students to read widely, to see through rhetorical tricks, to hear how seductive rhythm can be in persuading people to buy, to vote, to protest, to calm down, to be happy… After all, scientists will create the vaccine programme but it’s wordsmiths who will convince people to take it up. Summative assessments in MYP, require students to demonstrate their understanding of the knowledge and skills that they have learnt in the unit by transferring them to an authentic situation. These assessments should feel like a performance and they are not quick to design. As a curriculum designer, it is essential to pinpoint what you want students to understand and how they will demonstrate their understanding. This is why the statement of inquiry and the assessment need to work symbiotically. It’s worth spending time making sure these two aspects of the unit cohere because once these are fully aligned, the learning activities stack up like dominoes. If the final assessment is a performance that enables students to demonstrate understanding by transferring knowledge, it needs to have a certain amount of flexibility built in. Students should to be able to work through a process and make mistakes. They will practise all elements of this process through the learning activities in the unit of work. Designing these assessments involves creativity and risk taking. One of the attractions of MYP is that it encourages teachers to be bold. Risk taking means that some assessments will not work so well, but the process of reflection built into UbD encourages practitioners to reflect and refine each year. UbD advises that we think big but start small. It advises that teachers unfamiliar with UbD start by taking a unit of learning that they feel confident with and adapting it to the UbD framework. This approach provides both teachers and students a comfortable context within which to familiarise themselves with new ways of working, to build on their expertise and to gain insight into the pitfalls and opportunities MYP has to offer.

Approaches to learning (ATL): Full curriculum alignment

Alignment is a key concept of MYP and curriculum planning. As I mentioned in my previous post, MYP offers a holistic approach to education leading to greater integration between academic, extra-curricular and pastoral programmes. The final consideration, before populating the learning tasks, are Approaches to Learning. These are explicitly designed to develop the IB Learner Profile and focus on ‘soft skills’ (or how to be a human skills) like how to work collaboratively, how to think, how to take risks. This is the plant-food of our garden: the compost, the tomato feed, the fertiliser. Without these elements, knowledge and skills cannot flourish. The final summative assessment performance in these units should necessitate engagement with specific Approaches to Learning. Although not specifically assessed, they need to be integral to the task. The requirement that all of these approaches are covered in an academic year, steers us towards a variety of learning approaches. This should help ensure that whether your preferred teaching style is: Sit down! Shut up! Listen to another rambling lecture from me! (my personal favourite) Or Group work! Everyone stick a post-it note to your head and start milling about! (shudder) your students will experience a healthy variety of learning opportunities.

 

Next week: Authentic Assessment

 

 

 

 

 

Beginnings

The International Baccalaureate® aims to develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect.

To this end the organization works with schools, governments and international organizations to develop challenging programmes of international education and rigorous assessment.

These programmes encourage students across the world to become active, compassionate and lifelong learners who understand that other people, with their differences, can also be right.

I am standing outside the English and maths block on the 4^th of September. Students flow around the school following the painted arrows on the floor marking out the government mandated one-way system. Yesterday, when the school was empty of students, it looked like a well-planned irrigation system; today the lockdown glacier has melted and we are facing an avalanche. After six months at home, 1300 students are roaring towards us in a clamour of excitement, fear and confusion.

I started the day by pinning the IB mission statement to my new office wall. These are the kind of lofty ideals that bought me to teaching a decade ago but which are all too easily overwhelmed in the race for grades, progress 8 scores, promotion and recognition.

My colleague and I hold the doors open, smile through our masks, and adopt the familiar roles of Calm & Reassuring. The kids don’t need to know that we’re as anxious as they are.

Welcome back! Do you have a face covering?

Could you put it on, please? Not there! You’re blocking the door…

Get off his back!

Did you have a good summer – turn left, please. It’s a one-way system. No! The other left.

Of course I’m pleased to see you. Remember any Macbeth quotes? Nope, me neither…

Yes – all the way round, please. It’s a ONE-way system.

Every now and then, the flow is stemmed by a tiny, tearful year 7, the full force of a hundred students at his shoulder.

Don’t worry, Ms Sen can tell you where to go. Just stand to the side. Good lad.

I am aware that these scenes are playing out across the city, across the country, across the continent and across much of the northern hemisphere: generation lockdown are returning to their new normal after six months at home.

My own daughter stood at the front door this morning in protest uniform: red nails, a fistful of rings, flicky eyeliner and her uniform skirt a good 6 inches above the knee. Despite six months at home, her shirt looked unwashed…

You’re going into school like that?

At least I’m going into school…

There have been more tears from staff and students than I remember seeing in ten years of working in schools.

The torrent has slowed and we are left with the final trickle. First comes Evie: fourteen, fierce. She walks quickly and ignores any requests to put on a face covering. Her hair is straightened, her face neutralised with foundation, eyebrows pencilled on – her fat brown furry forehead friends. But they don’t hide the panic in her eyes. Lockdown has not been easy on some students and even though school is the safest place for them to be, they will be the most resistant to returning. A member of the pastoral team follows Evie, directing her in firm but kind tones. The pastoral team will spend most of the morning cajoling, joking, chivvying and bargaining with similar characters.

We are desperate to reintegrate these students: they will disrupt our meticulously planned lessons, they will trash our scores but even in affluent Cambridge, county line drug gangs prowl the perimeter of these students’ lives. We are all aware that there are lean times ahead for young people. Applications for a single bar job are running into the hundreds and entry-level office jobs are non-existent. These kids are going to need to do more than pass their exams to make it.

Finally come a cluster of students with pronounced special needs accompanied by learning support assistants. All of these kids are wearing face coverings, though there are some eccentric adaptions. One child peers out from a mask that seems to engulf his entire face. It’s not clear that he can see as he stumbles past us. Another has a face shield on at such a sharp angle that it’s more like an oversized running visor. This group of students is vulnerable for different reasons. They are visibly agitated: some are trembling; some are protesting loudly about following the one-way systems; some are counter protesting (equally) loudly about the lack of adherence to the one-way systems. All of them are terrified that they are going to forget a rule. We are all forgetting the rules all of the time. It’s a lot to remember.

After the last student scurries to his tutor base, I wander through the empty corridors to the sanctuary of my office, close my door and reread the IB mission statement. This year I am leading on the implementation of the Middle Years Programme at Key Stage 3. The need to develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world has never been more pressing. I haven’t felt this excited about a work project in quite some time.

I have been leading the English IB diploma and career programmes for a few years now and I know, that properly taught, IB programmes can be transformative. The explicit focus on critical thinking, developing the IB Learner Profile and the requirement for students to integrate self-directed physical activity, meaningful extra-curricular activity and service elements into their lives shapes to a fully integrated pastoral, academic and co-curricular experience. Like many people, before teaching the IB, I believed that the main difference between A-levels and the IB was the opportunity to access a broader academic curriculum. I now understand that it’s the opportunity to access a broader concept of what it means to be educated.

The challenge of MYP is to feed this down into the lower school.

When my children were younger, they were involved in an organisation called Woodcraft Folk. On more than one occasion, I found myself cheek down in a damp field in Cambridgeshire, under a dampening of drizzle, blowing at sparks inside a pyramid of twigs. Stationed around me were hopeful and overly confident children clutching sticks and tree trunks foraged from surrounding woods. The minute I had coaxed the pyramid into flame, it was their job to build the fire. Some of these kids were sensible and compliant wielding dry batons of hazel and beech. Others were visionaries, with huge damp logs, resolutely non-compliant, evangelical in their belief that these logs would explode into flame. Behind these children were a team of adults but the golden impediment rule of Woodcraft Folk, is that all activities are child led and all the children are included. The longer we worked together, the better we became at marshalling the children. The children fed the fires and the adults cooperated with them to ensure that the fires took hold. Even huge, spongey crumbly logs found their place: we all watched curiously to see what would happen. I learnt a lot about fire.

I feel like I am cheek to mud again, looking at a glimmer as the rain falls.

It feels challenging to start a fire in a storm but perhaps this is when it’s most needed. The future has never felt so uncertain. As we embark on this school year we are unsure whether we will stay open for the whole year, unsure whether the students will sit their exams and unsure what those exams will look like. Perhaps, in the absence of so many answers we should be focusing our teaching on how to ask questions.

At the heart of the Middle Years Programme is inquiry based learning. This is not some facile exhortation to let the teachers drink coffee and hand over lesson planning to the children: rather it acknowledges that education arises from the fundamental human desire to make sense of the world around us. Curiosity and wonder are innate in all our students and yet as a classroom practitioner, the answer to the eternal “Why do we need to know this?” question is still all too often: “To pass the exam.”   

The IB encourages practitioners to journey alongside their students with a clear curriculum map but also with an open mind seeking opportunities to connect Pythagoras, alliteration or ecosystems with a student’s lived experience. MYP builds the curriculum around conceptual questions leading to inquiry-based dialogic lessons which enable us to “stretch students’ thinking beyond the topic itself”. As an IB teacher, if my students are not asking questions and pursuing lines of inquiry that are meaningful to them, I am not really delivering the programme. For teachers used to delivering the content driven GCSE curricula, this is quite a mind shift.

A truth that classroom experience teaches us again and again is that the most interesting answers lie nascent in the questioning wild minds of our students (often the ones heaving damp logs into a fire). If the events of the past year have taught us anything, it is that we are a global community in crisis with no clear answers. It thus feels fitting that we are embarking on an educational journey whose end is inquiry: teaching students how to ask questions and how to think critically about the answers they find.

Next week – curriculum planning.