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