The national curriculum is exciting and challenging. We’re desperate to develop it for OUR learners. I wrote this in an email to colleagues (obviously edited here to get rid of personal names and so on…):

I went to a really good session with our Awareness Learning Area (LA) yesterday delivered by the Learning Leader (LL) of Awareness (for external readers, Awareness is PSHE, History, Geography, Learning to Learn, Health and Social Care, RS, Citizenship). Here’s what I took from it that you might want to use with your teams:

When you read through the curriculum documentation it starts with concepts. When you’re reading about concepts it’s really easy to start thinking about content and get side-tracked. Of course, we want to move away from a content driven curriculum and towards skills and competencies. So instead of looking at concepts first, the LL had us look at processes. I spent some time, for example looking at the second process in the Geography National Curriculum – “select and use fieldwork tools and techniques appropriately, safely and efficiently”.

The question then asked was “what implications does this have for us?” and the first year Geography teacher (the Head of Geography wasn’t present) and I started talking about the local dog-track, about a local roundabout, about a local park and even about our BSF program. We talked about the use of GIS (I don’t understand this term either, but it’s Google Earth and stuff like that), using the websites that map that we’re on a flood plain (that I know the head teacher has talked about in the context of BSF) digital cameras, video cameras and so on (I’m not a Geography specialist, so I started waffling on about those tripod things that people stand in fields and use to do something – I don’t even know what it is) and these would need to be in our Schemes of Learning.

We then looked at the concepts that map onto this process – and lots of the concepts in Geography do, but the major ones were Place, Space and Scale. This started a conversation with the Geography teacher regarding what the Scheme of Learning might look like to deliver the opportunities for students to actually gain experience of using the skill/ process “select and use fieldwork tools…” and suddenly we started to get a picture of what we would like to put in our Geography Year 7 Scheme of Learning (or when we look at the Scheme of Learning, where we already deliver this and tweaking it).

So after mapping the concepts onto the processes, the next stage would be to select the right content to deliver these processes and concepts (the Geography teacher and I didn’t get to this stage), and then we can look at the exciting stuff around Curriculum Opportunities (which is the fourth section in the documentation). It means the colleagues in the Awareness LA are not only using the National Curriculum stuff now, but are getting some concrete ’stuff’ done and moving past the ‘thinking about it’ stage that we’ve all been going through.