[MUSIC] To learn tiger scaring it's very helpful to have a real tiger. This illustration from the book The Sabre Tooth Curriculum, is a parody of a lot of what we do in education. Because we don't make our teaching and learning relevant, active, engaging. So trying constantly to find the right stimulus, the right mode of communication with our students is the big challenge. And Kelly, writing in 1987, talked about curriculum. Not as something handed down which we then deliver, but as a process. As you read this, consider that last sentence there. Many teachers regard issues of curriculum as of no concern to them, since they have regarded their task as simply to transmit bodies of knowledge. When we make curriculum a living thing, curriculum is something that we're always rethinking, revisiting. And making active processes, in which our learners and teachers are both engaged and both creative. We've talked a bit, in this course, about simple ideas. Three simple ideas, such as connect, extend, and challenge. For example. Well, here are five, what I've called, key trilogies. The first, formal, informal, and hidden. These are probably very familiar to you, these notions. That there is a formal curriculum, the one that's handed down. The one that is there for us to use as a basis for teaching and learning. Then there's the informal curriculum, those things that are not prescribed but happen outside of the formal curriculum. Often, perhaps extracurricular activities or learning that goes on in between lessons, or during lunch times, or during after school activities. And the the third, the hidden curriculum, and this is also the most powerful and the most frequently misunderstood. But the hidden curriculum is fraught. We convey to students the lessons the students take about the nature of authority. We're here to listen, while the teacher's there to teach. The nature of the classroom is where all learning occurs. So, underneath what we're actually doing in a classroom is a lot of the hidden assumptions that people bring with them. The second of our five key trilogies comes from Alfred North Whitehead, the American philosopher and educator. Who talked about learning always going through three important cycles, which he called, romance, precision, and generalisation. But all learning should start with romance. Thinking and playing with ideas, not getting too precise, not asking for right and wrong answers. And when we start with romance, we can go on from there to precision, to tying down our ideas a bit more. And then from there, once we have a good grasp of the situation, we begin to generalize our ideas to other contexts, to other situations. And when we generalize, we need to come back again to the romantic stage. So there's always little eddies or cycles of learning. That go from Romance to Precision, to Generalisation. You might want to think about how those ideas would apply in the teaching of mathematics. Or the teaching of science, or the teaching of literature. Of course a lot of literature is romantic in that sense. That it's playing with ideas, but what about mathematics? Is it always about precision? Where in mathematics, can you play with ideas? Why do two and two make four? Is that pretty obvious? Or is it grounds for some kind of discussion? How do we do our addition and subtraction? We find that children do it in all sorts of different ways. And when we begin to compare, we are in that kind of adventure stage of playing with ideas. The third trilogy describes the enactive, the iconic, and the symbolic. This comes from Jerome Bruner, who talks about all learning. All learning should start with the inactive doing. We do things. And it's through doing things that we begin to learn. When I was taught in school, I was taught algebra. We started in the wrong place. We started with the symbolic. An alpha plus a beta equals a gamma. I never understood that. I never understood quadratic equations, how if you takes things from one side of the equation to the other, they change their value. It was only years later when I visited a classroom in a primary school and found children playing with a bean balance that I understood, this is what equations are about, makes a lot of sense. And of course good primary teaching starts there. In fact, all good teaching starts with the enactive, doing things. And then to the iconic, which is about picturing things, having pictures of what we are learning. Before we move on to the symbolic which is symbols. And abstract ideas. And again, in the cycle we can go back through that inactive and through the iconic and symbolic as a recurring process. And our fourth of the key trilogies, knowing, doing, and feeling that all our learning Has those three components. And the more we can use the feeling component and the doing component, then the more the knowing component actually has some kind of impact on your pupils' thinking and their learning. And the fifth. The intended, the implemented, and the attained curriculum. The intended curriculum of course, we're full of good ideas about what we want children to achieve and the standards we want them to achieve, content and skills to be taught. The implemented curriculum is actually what we do in classrooms. The practices we engage in and the nature of the pedagogy. And the attained curriculum is at the end of the day. When we have a demonstration by students that they have actually learned what we wanted to teach. Well, think about. Some of these ideas. Think about what they mean to you. Go back and have a look again at those five trilogies, and think about well which of those could I use most powerfully in my own classroom? Well let's look just briefly at some of the key principles of curriculum in planning. Principle 1, you obviously have to select what's to be learned and what's to be taught. The second principle you have to develop a strategy which is going to make that most effective. Thirdly you're gonna have to make a decision about the sequence in which things are taught, not always the most obvious the sequence. You may start with a big idea and puzzle from there. So we don't always go from simple to complex. Maybe sometimes we start with a very complex idea and then make it simpler. And the fourth principle, how do we diagnose strengths and weaknesses of our students? And how do we differentiate in order to meet individual learning. And then for further principles, which we might call Curriculum in action. The first principle, studying and evaluating students' progress. How are they getting on, what are they learning, what obstacles are they meeting? The second principle, evaluating the progress of my own teaching. how align developing effectively and building on what I know about good and effective teaching. The third principle adaptability of the curriculum to varying contexts, to varying pupil contexts abilities, to varying environments, to varying peer group situations. That's the flexibility and the complexity. And the fourth principle, understanding a bit more and evaluating a bit more closely. What causes the variation in our children's learning? Why are some grasping the idea immediately and moving on? Why are some finding it more difficult to get what seems a very simple idea? How do we get that knowledge of where our children are in very different stages of their learning? So to look at this idea of moving from delivering the curriculum, to a partnership in learning. Here's a teacher in a school not far from Cambridge, in England. And this teacher started out her life as a young teacher delivering the curriculum. That's what she did. Then she moved on and thought a bit more about, let's talk about the purpose and objectives of learning. Why are we doing this, what are we going to learn from this? Then she moved along a little bit more, and thought about what would be the indicators of achievement? How would I know when students are actually engaging and learning well? And moving on a bit further, how would I engage students as assessors? Of their own learning and of others' learning. And then an even deeper level, pupils begin to be determiners of their learning and become partners. So that the teacher and the student together are discussing where they want to go, how they're going to learn, how they will know when they've learned something important. That kind of dialogue, when I visited that teacher's classroom, I was amazed at just how sophisticated these young people were. Because they were able to talk knowledgeably about the nature and process of learning and achievement. Well, in 1949, A scholar called Tyler wrote this in answer to the question how will we know? Since the real purpose of education is not to have the teacher perform certain activities, but to bring about significant changes in student's patterns of behavior. And when we talk about objectives, what a statement of what the teacher's going to do, but the changes that take place in our students. As you come to the end of the fourth lecture in this second week, you might want to go back again and have a look at the four presentations, and various activities that have accompanied them. Go back again and look at some of the videos and some of the readings. You will have taken part in forum and discussed some of these ideas hopefully. And you will be taking the quiz at the end of this. But my advice is when you take the quiz, make sure that before you do that, that you have gone back, thought about, rehearsed, reflected, again on some of the big ideas. So that when it comes to taking the quiz you feel very confident that you have not just absorbed the knowledge, but you have thought pretty critically about what these sessions have been about. [MUSIC]
