Curriculum Design

CPD: Cognitive Science Level 2, topic 4.2.1

Here, we will discuss a few ideas about what to keep in mind when designing curriculum.

Currently, Ofsted is putting curriculum design at the forefront of education.
Chief Inspector Amanda Spielman says that "accumulated wealth of human knowledge, and what we choose to pass on to the next generation through teaching in our schools (the curriculum), must be at the heart of education”.

According to Michael Chiles, three things are important to keep in mind when designing a curriculum:
Provide pupils with a wide scope of knowledge that helps them to understand the subject in depth.
Interleave between underlying concepts and process that support subject-specific knowledge, embedding retrieval and spaced practice.
Ensure students are aware of all the inter-weaving skills which will help them to demonstrate the knowledge they acquired.

According to Rosalind Walker, a well-made curriculum is the best way to ensure our students create solid schemas that will allow them to keep learning effectively.
The curriculum has to link all the bits of knowledge in a sequence that allows schemas to be built piece by piece.
The curriculum should be a "curated journey", that should be subject-specific.

School Science Knowledge

This session is based on Rosalind Walker's ideas. You can read more from her on her blog rosalindwalker.wordpress.com.

Rosalind Walker argues that teaching needs to be subject-specific.
Although we know of strategies that work effectively, one subject is still different from the others and it is important to keep that in mind before adjusting your lessons to a generic whole-school policy.
She describes how she sees school science knowledge.

For Walker, the school science knowledge can be organised in a web with nodes and links.
The nodes contain the prepositions, such as:
Physical principles.
Specific and yet general implications of the principle.
Exemples of phenomena that follow the principle.
Procedures to calculate or analyse the principle.
The links between the nodes would be explanatory relations.

The nodes and links of the knowledge web are objective and not really up for debate.
The interesting thing is to decide how to teach them.
Walker argues that we need to explicitly teach pupils the organization of the knowledge and how each proposition is connected to the other.
We also need to pay attention to misconceptions. One example is that many students believe that a force is necessary to maintain an object moving.

The number of exemplars in a knowledge map is limited. However, the number of exemplars in the real world is infinite.
For example, we can talk to students plant hormones in beans. They need to be able to identify the underlying principles of that knowledge so they are able to answer an exam question that asks about plant hormones using potatoes and the illustration.
Thus, in classes, we must try and widen student knowledge by using not only the classic exemplars, but many many others.

In Sciences, much of the classes involve calculations and problem-solving.
Walker recommends that we explicitly teach students each step of each procedure, so they become fluent in it. With enough practice, all steps will become automated.

How does Rosalind Walker see the Science curriculum?
Which of these match Rosalind Walker's ideas about the Science curriculum?
Which of those is NOT represented by a node in Walker's web of School science knowledge?