Teachers - what are your views on education? Are you for a creative curriculum or more traditional styles of teaching?

[magdalene]

"There are two fundamentally different views of education. On the one hand, there is the emphasis on the child. The insistence that everything must be relevant to the child's experience and to the perceived needs of society. The argument that the teacher should be the mentor or coach who facilitates the growth of the child's understanding. The current obsession with personalisation. On the other, there is the belief that the school is an institution in which children are initiated by teachers, who are authorities in their subjects, into a body of knowledge which has no immediate connection to their lives or necessary relevance to the problems of society. I believe in the latter" Chris Woodhead

What are your views? I think education should be a combination of the two. I am concerned that the 'creative curriculum' has gone too much the other way and acquiring knowledge is seen as Victorian and dull. If you have inspiring teachers with excellent subject knowlege then they can make their lesson lots of fun!

The head has the ultimate responsibility for how the school runs.
My school has followed what is often called a creative curriculum for many years but we prefer to see as a cross curricula approach. We follow children's interests to an extent to teach the essential skills our children need.

That word again 'skills' - what about knowledge? Do the children know what they need to learn at the age of 5, 6 and 7? What is cross curricula? How does it work?

In my Y2 class a child asked "Where does chocolate come from?" so we did a cross curricula project that involved looking at the history of chocolate - Mayan and Aztec
Fair Trade - production of chocolate
Geography - where in the world cocoa is grown - climate needed for growth - production and distribution
English we looked at advertising and designed our own chocolate bar and created our own advertising campaigns which we videoed
Science - how materials (chocolate)changes when subjected to heating and cooling and is the change permanent or reversible - does the size of the pieces influence the time taken to melt - do different types of chocolate take different lengths of time to melt
Maths - data handling /surveys favourite chocolate / chocolate bars made graphs used ICT to produce data
Read Michael Rosen chocolate poem and discussed what happened
Read Charlie and The Chocolate Factory wrote character descriptions
and ...........

Art produced art work for chocolate bar packaging
DT - made chocolate lollies

Really, what do they NEED to know at 5,6,7? I don't really know, but they WANT to know about the weird animals of Madagascar, about how polar bears can swim for 400 miles and anything to do with toilets! That's why we ask our children to tell us what they want to learn about and plan from their ideas. We tailor their ideas to the Rose Curriculum, which we are using as curriculum guidance at the moment.

'Cross curricular' means that you do activities focussing on other subjects within your creative curriculum topic. (For example, if your cross curricular subject is The Tudors - you may study Tudor dances, write newspaper reports, look at Tudor art, etc, etc.) In addition to this, some schools also run a discrete literacy/maths lesson as well.

I thought the creative curriculum thing was being knocked on the head by Gove - and primary schools were going to have to go back to teaching subjects as individual strands.

My DS's primary school has moved to the sort of approach mrz describes re the chocolate topic and it seems to work well.

I am a secondary head of English. I believe children deserve to have knowledge about the English literary heritage etc, skills to required to be accurate and fluent writers but most of all I want their creativity to be nurtured and celebrated. I try to have an approach which is a marriage of the three.

I'm worried about Gove because he comes up with things like 'teachers should be free to teach' and 'we need to teach history in chronological order'. His comments never add up (prescriptive or non-prescriptive?) - I fear that cauldrons of trouble may be brewing!

All our topics work like mrz's. It is so good, because children become involved in their learning. I have a whole wall covered in information about our 'topic' - not because I've handed out homework, but because the children are interested and are entusiatic to find out more.

I think there is a great deal of misunderstanding regarding the "creative curriculum". The New Primary Curriculum produced by Labour (and scrapped by Gove) was often hailed as the creative curriculum when in fact the old/current National Curriculum can be a creative curriculum if schools want to use it that way.

I agree, but we are using the Rose Curriculum just to ensure we are offering the children a broad curriculum. As a general (if wishy-washy) guide, the Rose curriculum is quite useful, although we often have to dip into the old NC regaring skills progression.

I am really worried about Gove. We (teachers) were just getting excited about the creative curriculum - the chance to teach children in a way which would actually interest them and fit in with their stage of development ... and then in he comes and suggests (according to our science coordinator) back to subject lessons and separate strands for science. Physics for five-year olds, with notes to copy from the board instead of creating shadow puppets of the fairy tale we are reading.

but the National Curriculum is the statutory document that schools must follow so by following the Rose curriculum your school is breaking the law (if it is maintained?)

but UnSerpentQuiCourt there is nothing to stop you following the current NC in a creative way many schools have been doing just that for years.

mrz said: In my Y2 class a child asked "Where does chocolate come from?" so we did a cross curricula project

Which is all very well, but what if there were children in the class who didn't want to know where chocolate came from? How can this 'following a child's interest' be reconciled with the possibility that you might be boring the rest rigid?

(We learned all about chocolate in Y5 [except it was 3rd year Juniors, then..] courtesy of that nice Mr Cadbury who sent us lots and lots of resources )

I'm really in favour of cross-curricular learning. I'm hoping to teach KS2 and have been jotting down (well, typing) ideas for my future pupils. One of these is having cross-curricular days maybe once a term where the children vote in advance for a topic, and then all the subjects that day would be based around it. It'd be a completely different set up to a normal school day.

Am definitely stealing chocolate as a potential topic :o

Of course the curriculum and rules will probably change at least three hundred times before I start teaching anyway so who knows!

Fortunately all the class were interested maizie (not only because it involved lots of tasting activities) and luckily so were Ofsted who enjoyed the eating part too...
but if I had chosen the topic and done say Grace Darling would more or less children want to know?

As long as the NC elements are taught does it really matter who chooses the theme we use to deliver them?

I think we can go too far either way.

Very prescriptive curriculums produce solid skills - the 3 Rs are well ingrained which forms the basic for pretty much everything else - however they don't encourage individuality or train children to think.

Curriculums with no coherent content or standardised goals mean children may come out able to think but illiterate.

Ideally there should be a fixed set of learning aims, probably skills based and evaluated by a degree of retained knowledge but taught in' a flexible and creative way.

Re: cross-curricular learning - it's much, much more likely to engage children and encourage them to retain information because they're making connections and using skills rather than being expected to absorb.

Ultimately, the dichotomy is entirely false-the creative curriculum delivers skills and facts, as do other methods. And very few teachers have ever sat there thinking 'how can I make this as boring as possible'.

Personally, I love the creative curriculum and it's one of the reasons I love my new job. But the creative curriculum places a greater burden on teachers to have good general and subject knowledge and to replan and collaborate, it demands they are better educated and better at their job than if they just instruct. And I can't help thinking one of the reasons Gove's dislikes it is for this reason: charitably because he doesn't think primary teachers up to it; uncharitably because he doesn't want them to have any power.

I prefer to think of balance in terms of where we want learners to go. For KS1 that means enabling them to learn further-in and out of school-without the media of learning being an obstacle-so a solid focus on reading, numeracy and ICT and an ability to work with others in a school environment. For subjects like History it means helping them understand differences and similarities with the past so that they have these basic concepts in place for more organised fact learning. At A-Level for History it would mean less emphasis on fact and more on questioning authority, if the aim is to create decent undergraduates.

I meet very few KS2 or KS3 teachers whose fundamental complaint is that learners don't know enough subject basics and facts yet. Yet nearly all of my former colleagues teaching in HE would complain that any sense of creativity and challenge had gone with secondary education, but also that a sense of space and time (for History) was absent in frightening ways.

Weren't teachers teaching in an imaginative and creative way before the 'creative curriculum' was introduced? I bloody well hope so! The national curriculum is there to provide a structure but I am sure teachers could add to it as well. Perhaps there needs to be a rewriting of the curriculum BY TEACHERS not government.

Why is there a perception that if you teach subjects in separate strands that it will just involve copying from the board? Surely there is enough fascinating and interesting stuff to learn in Science ON ITS OWN without having the extra burden of finding some tenuous link with another subject. And you can go into greater depth when you are teaching separate subjects. You can teach knowledge in a very CREATIVE way if you have the subject knowledge and are basically a good teacher.

"And very few teachers have ever sat there thinking 'how can I make this as boring as possible'." Except in France

Was CW talking about primary education?

I took his comments to be more applicable to the later years.

I can quite see how cross curricula education engages very young children and allows them to make connections between subjects (a very good thing imvho).

However, there does come a point where some fundementals have to be taught in order to take a subject to any level of profficiency and depth.
And sometimes those fundementals might be a bit boring no matter how hard the teacher tries.
But that should not dissuade a teacher becuase without them the pupil simply cannot move forward.

It cannot be left to the choice of the pupils in those circumstances.

wordfactory

Agree that the comments seem most applicable to the later years, but the threat is to early years teaching this way.

Even at later stages, though, giving meaning to learning does seem very helpful. There was one recent study of high-school science students which piloted explaining why physics was cool before delivering the same 'boring' lessons and got better results. At university too asking students why they want to learn and what they offer, even if you then do nothing with it, has been shown to have positive effects |(and more so if you respond).

Pointless dichotomies aside (the second statement seems quite applicable to much creative learning too) the point about teachers' quality is really important. We live near a castle so last term looked at castles in school, to which one colleague objected because 'there weren't really any women in the middle ages'. Noen of my colleagues knew what language Jesus spoke when asked by a visiting speaker. I wrote a Primary PGCE reference for one student two years ago, who has just completed training. He distinguished himself previously by thinking Ireland was in the Mediterranean and asking if George Osborne was a Tory. If one of his pupils asks him 'where chocolate comes from' it's hard to see an answer much beyond 'Tesco' (or, when I knew him, 'my girlfriend's handbag'). And, at the other end of the scale, I sometimes wonder whether looking at what floats and why was really any better for learners when done with a mini-castle and moat I'd bashed together (that was under attack and needed a 'boat' built) or whether I just enjoyed it more.

Probably the key thing, Adela, was whether the children enjoyed it more, and therefore remembered what they had learnt. And I agree, I have worked with some dire primary teachers, whose general knowledge was shockingly absent and who I would never want to allow near my daughter. It is a problem that the profession has such a mixed intake.

Magdalene, of course there are fascinating things to learn in science on its own. The trouble, when you are teaching 6-year olds, or 7-year olds, or 8-year olds, is that they don't think in subject compartments. They find it very hard if you say, right, that's the end of our hour of science, so forget about floating and sinking, now we are doing geography. This is a map of Europe. (Which is how it was done in more than one school in which I worked.) Much better to work through the floating and sinking, make a great boat, draw it and label it, then think, how far could this boat travel? Let's look at a map. Here is the castle; look, that line is a river. If we follow it down to the sea, where do we arrive?

magdalene the National Curriculum tells us what we need to teach but doesn't tell us how to teach so there has always been the freedom to be creative if brave enough ... however we also had the Literacy Strategy and the Numeracy Strategy which some schools/teachers were made to follow although it was never statutory

Imagine being creative while clock watching
Recommended structure of a literacy hour

First section (15 minutes)

• Make the objectives of the lesson clear
• Whole class: Modelling reading using an enlarged text, or modelling writing by scribing with the class.

Second section (15 minutes)
-Whole class: Focused word or sentence work.

Third section (about 20 minutes)

• Group or individual work: Reading, writing or word and sentence work, while the teacher works with one or more ability group on guided text work.

Final section (about 10 minutes)

• Whole class plenary session: Reviewing the learning that has taken place related to the objectives of the lesson; the pupils, not the teacher, explain what they have learnt.

I can see the difficulties mrz: perhaps an overhaul of the national curriculum is needed. More input from teachers and less from government.

Unserpentquicourt - I can see where you are coming from but the children will be studying separate subjects at secondary school so why not get them prepared for that? Also it will help the children concentrate for longer if you focus on separate subjects and you'd be able to do so much more with the subject if it is seen as a separate entity.