Rich Curricula Need A Rich Design Process
Thinking about and developing our music curriculum is one of the great passions and motivations of our music team. To do it well and with rigour, we are constantly working on and in one of the four stages below (these are elaborated upon in the CPD section of the website.). The quality of work we can achieve is dependent on the developmental culture our school promotes, the ring-fenced time we have to develop our work alongside our day to day commitments, and the trust from school leaders that we, as subject specialists are best placed to unlock and deliver innovative curricula that are complementary to high quality outcomes.
Creating Planning Questions For Our Curriculum
Our curriculum planning/tuning process requires deep, targeted thinking around our 'big ideas'. One key process for doing this is generating questions that ensure our lived out curriculum reflects these ideas. These questions are used for planning, re-viewing and re-drafting schemes, projects and lessons and are, themselves, reviewed & developed.
Project Planning Checklist
Once we have a rich, values infused base and thoughtful questions to ask of our curricula, we can carry out more detailed and thoughtful project/scheme planning. We deliver most of our curriculum through term long (approximately 12 weeks) projects, that are planned in reference to an adapted checklist linked to a design for learning introduced to the UK and School21 by Innovation Unit, a social enterprise who believe in the power of human potential, agency and collective action. This design, promoting 'REAL' (Rigorous, Engaging, Authentic Learning) projects, aims to connect deep subject content with real world problem solving. Our project planning features many of the core elements deemed crucial to this brand of high quality projects, with adaptations we feel are important for planning music based projects with our values in mind.
Project Tunings
All curriculum planning benefits from an effective tuning process in order to develop ideas, work through dilemmas and maximise the quality of what students will spend an entire term working on. It provides an opportunity to receive feedback for re-drafting work at various different stages in the planning process and is as developmental for staff tuning a project, as it is for the staff member who's work is being tuned. We often use the following tuning protocol in department meetings and sometimes with staff in other subjects to support our planning.
Thinking First Lesson Planning
In response to a school wide 'teach meet' about teaching and learning, we have explored a 'thinking first' based approach for planning individual lessons. This ensures that short term planning simultaneously holds the bigger aims of our project/curriculum to account whilst being responsive to the needs of our classes. It also stops lesson planning beginning with or revolving around the creation of an overly prescriptive powerpoint presentation, which, if really necessary, should not come until later. Here is an example of this purposefully quick lesson planning process (restrict yourself to 5-10mins for filling this in), featuring questions that could be relevant to the planning of any subject (these questions are just a few examples, and subject teams could generate their own according to the priorities for their cohorts/lessons). The process is quick because so much time has already been invested in the detail of the project/lessons through the long/medium term planning processes.
Critiquing & Re-Drafting for High Quality Work
A subsequent step after the above process is thinking about how and when you will build in critique (ideally through carefully chosen talk protocols, near-peer learning models or teacher led high quality examples) and re-drafting opportunities effectively into the lesson. When this aspect of teaching pedagogy is done well it unlocks the learning and deepens the journey to understanding and exploring music well. It is fundamental to great teaching and can be used for academic writing, exam practice and creative tasks equally effectively. Here is an example of a critiquing process that we are currently working with in conjunction with thinking first lesson planning questions.