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Evidence Base: Interleaving the Curriculum

Updated: Jan 28

This week I will present to a collection of colleagues who have put themselves forward to review their subject’s KS3 curriculum. We want to look at what we do as a School and how we are inspiring and motivating our young people to look forward to their lessons. My role this week is to present some evidence on how to go about curriculum planning as in Art we are taught how to plan a curriculum at ITT stage. This seemed like a pretty straightforward brief, I had run sessions before on ‘Building Mental Models’ and thought I could lift quite a lot of those slides; however, as I started digging deeper I realised that I wasn’t really cemented in what some of the keys terms or concepts meant in practice.


I started by looking at the curriculum resources WalkThrus offer. I love the Coherent Mapping series, slide three is ‘Map the Spiralling of Concept’ - perfect, I thought, to get in interleaving, spacing and retrieval pedagogy. I think this is something I am doing in the Art curriculum already, but suddenly my confidence was shaken.


I looked back on my previous slides about interleaving and noticed how… thin… they were. Maybe I never really understood it back then? I know it is important - the research tells us that interleaving means students retain information more effectively, form better understanding of content and perform better on tests (Rohrer et al., 2020), but a lot of the literature focuses on revision. Is it really a useful tool for curriculum design? As I started plotting out the content for the session, one big question kept surfacing for me, am I really interleaving in my curriculum?


I went back to one of the best places I know for pedagogy breakdown - InnerDrive. This gave me some great stuff to start with but didn’t fill me with confidence about curriculum design. Teach Like a Hero and TES wrote much more convincingly about interleaving your curriculum. With Third Space Learning offering this quote;


Instead of focusing on a single aspect of a topic extensively before moving on to the next, interleaving incorporates multiple aspects of the topic to cause learners to think more deeply about what they are doing.

Interleaving can be used in almost any area of study. The key is to interleave similar content to provide pupils with the opportunity to notice the differences between the content, as well as similarities. 


Can I confidently stand in front of my colleagues and say that I am doing this in Art? I think I am doing this, but am I really? I decided to reflect on what we do and why I have designed it so.


Art in my school is not assessed at KS3 through exams. I am never going to test their retention of painting, printmaking or ceramics. I fundamentally believe this is right, testing such practices would be limiting and futile. Just because I teach them to paint in one way, doesn’t mean that is the way to paint - the students are often better than me at innovating and learning as they go. That said, there are more black and white things I need them to retain and get better at. Therefore, I plan the KS3 curriculum so that students regularly review and develop the same five key Core Skills (check out our assessment grid in the resources section) which I know will support them at GCSE; 


  1. Developing ideas and critically analysing the work of others

  2. Creative making

  3. Reflection and improvement

  4. Presentation

  5. Oracy and Attitude to Learning


Each scheme of work looks for opportunities to do these five things. I scaffold the writing, reflection and presentation skills clearly along their learning journey so that they learn/refine skills each year and build on their previous learning. Sounds like interleaving, right?


To help me plan what I wanted to say to my colleagues, I decided to map this process for the Year 8 scheme of learning (see below). Our curriculum is built as a team, so we start with an overarching theme for the year - Identity. We then decide what are the important elements of identity we want the students to walk away with? A secure understanding of portraiture and self portraiture to start, then to build on their conceptual understanding of narrative art. Once we have a unit aim, we can then build the unit. This starts with which artists best suit our aims, aligns with our department vision of EDI and what order we will structure the building blocks of our five Core Skills. Each unit will take a different structure depending on the artist, the prior knowledge, the stage in the year and key stage. In the image below you can see that the unit on Self is structured differently to the unit on Narrative. In Self, we hold back on presentation skills, instead focusing on note taking and creative making to get the year going. Once they have the presentation skills developing, we can then jump in much more quickly in the Narrative unit. Most significantly - it is all tied together with a common theme, Identity, so the skills and knowledge are easily understood and transferable. The more I thought about it, the more certain I became that our model is a good example of interleaving in the curriculum.


Year 8 Curriculum Design, Art


Now I felt confident to stand up in front of my colleagues, imposter syndrome just a little smaller. My final stage of planning was to be clear what I wanted my colleagues to take away with them (see poster below). How could I direct them in their next steps?


Here are my core steps to start thinking about incorporating interleaving into a curriculum;


  1. Have a really clear understanding of what you want the students to learn over the whole curriculum; which elements really matter? Which ones do you want to be explicit about and constantly refer to? Limit it.


  1. Go back to the message that ‘Interleaving is often only helpful if the content being studied is related in some way’. Trying to force interleaving with subjects/topics that simply don’t relate is going to be both hard work and ineffective. Colleagues must think about where they can do this, rather than assuming it must feature everywhere. If they have identified the core knowledge and skills of their curriculum vision this becomes easier. How can these aims and ambitions be interleaved into each unit?


  1. I always bang on to everyone about the importance of being explicit. Share these goals with your colleagues, share the research about interleaving - you will have a lot of colleagues who have only ever taught in blocks. You need to convince them why this change is important. Expect that to take time.


  1. Share this with the students. Tell them why you are constantly going back to old ground, tell them why little and often makes a difference to the way we all learn. In Art we are now including reference to our Core Skills in each of the slides to help students identify where/when they are accessing those skills/knowledge. 


Is this something you already do? Is it something you aspire to?

What does this look like in other subjects? 

Can you share how you are interleaving your KS3 curriculum?





Links I found useful;







Rohrer, D., Dedrick, R. F., Hartwig, M. K., & Cheung, C.-N. (2020). A randomized controlled trial of interleaved mathematics practice. Journal of Educational Psychology, 112(1), 40–52. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000367

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