Curriculum Development: Initial Thoughts

It is becoming a theme in my posts that I am passionate about increasing creative thinking and curiosity in the classroom. Thinking about who we want our young people to be as adults in society we need flexible, agile, critical and persistent thinkers with humility and good skills in collaboration and communication. Is our curriculum doing that?

I have been exploring the Five Creative Habits by Bill Lucas (and others) and thinking about how my own curriculum vision aligns with these 5 habits which you can find out about here. I have been thinking too about the national curriculum review which is being undertaken and these thoughts have coalesced in an article written by Lucas about the curriculum review.

He voices his concerns about the Government's approach to the curriculum review and pokes holes in its narrow scope. Within those criticisms he makes some exciting and valuable comments about what we should be aspiring to in our curriculums and in our assessments. Here are a few snippets, but I encourage you to take the time to read the whole thing here:

Curriculum is much more than content. It also has to include the informal and the co-curricular, as well as those elements which are formally taught.

The curriculum should enrich and motivate learners and foster a lifelong love of learning in all pupils, according to its own invitation to respond. Currently, it is failing to enrich, motivate or inspire far too many pupils, as the astonishing numbers of persistently excluded and persistently absent pupils attest.

It is clear to me that our current curriculum is too crowded, too controlled and too centralised. And while I am focusing on words beginning with the letter C, let’s lament the fact that it currently misses out creative thinking, collaboration and communication, whereas the research from the OECD, UNECSO and the World Economic Forum – to name but three – makes these core competences or dispositions.

A move to a more learner-focused assessment model is one of many needed changes.

We need to move from a deficit model of assessment to a strengths-based one... We will also need to decide which elements should be nationally warranted, which regionally, which can be school-based, and which need no external validation. The major revolution here will be to develop a more sophisticated range of formative assessment tools so that the process of evidencing the development of pupils’ competences, skills and knowledge is multimodal.

Can we really be this radical? Rip up the rules of assessment and start afresh?