What is a skills based curriculum?

[skewiff]

Our primary school says one of its aims is to make the curriculum more skills based?

What does this mean?

One of the first things we were told to do for my Eng Lit undergrad was buy the Oxford History of Britain

LOL- this was exactly what I read in my first week in order to try to compensate for my crappy education to date and so that when my supervisor asked "which periods are you particularly interested in?" I had more to choose from than "The Romans" and "Hitler"

Gracious! you have had a poor history education no wonder you are upset if you think that is normal for all schools

It seems like, as with all these things, it really depends on the teachers and headteacher.

If you have a teacher like mrz , then your kids will be more than OK. What she describes (some rote learning where absolutely necessary but learning to apply skills to different subjects, choosing important, respected topics etc.) but it must be said that way upthread one of the teachers was arguing that learning times tables was (a) pointless as learning the way multiplication rules would be a better "skill" and (b) that there would be no time to learn times tables anyway.

A teqcher with an approach like that would make me run a mile.

An typical example of a skills based curriculum for history would start from the pupils themselves changes in their life (in nursery/reception) how their lives are different from the lives of their grandparents/great grandparents when they were children ... a stidy of a famous person in history ... a local history study, an overview of British History with an in depth study of Romans in Britain, Vikings, Anglo Saxons... Britain and the wider world in Tudor times ... Victorian Britain ... Britain since the 1930s ...plus a World history study and a more in depth study of Ancient Greece, Egyptians, Aztecs ...

alongside that would run the skills

chronological understanding - where events fit on a timeline
Knowledge and understanding of past events, people and change -why people did things - how things are different
historical interpretation how the past is depicted
historical enquiry finding out from a range of sources (not just google) asking questions and answering them
organisation and communication communication what they know ... using dates and vocabulary to describe the period.

Can I just state I teach times tables by rote (also addition facts) we recite/sing them every day backwards forwards and inside out plus the related division facts. I do that because it means the children can tackle word problems of the type on another thread without worrying about the actual calculation but can focus on what they need to do - in the example subtract then divide. That doesn't mean that I haven't taught my class what we are doing when we multiply - they have worked at repeat addition and arrays

I should say it takes about 10 mins

So MrZ, are you saying that secondary schools actually do start at the beginning and work through chronologically now then? because that's what I'm saying they should do. Anything else falls short IMO

mrz. Agree with Greythorne. Your version of a skills based curriculum is good as it includes knowledge. There is a much cruder idea out there based on the idea that you don't need knowledge, 'you can look it up'. That idea has been repeated frequently on this thread and I hear it repeatedly. It is that idea I was addressing.
At my dd1 s first school learning times tables or spellings was total anathema. Although at junior level kids did of course encounter some knowledge it was largely in response to their own enquries and so there were two outcomes:
They covered much less knowledge
Tended to repeat similar themes that were inside their current knowledge base.
So the consequence was a distinct loss of of breadth and depth.
My dd is now at a school where she is learning so much more, she is like a sponge and thirsty to find out about the world. She is now being educated in a way that will really help her when she is a yr10 history student - or a student of any other subject. Skills are also very much addressed.

Secondary schools don't start at the beginning and work through. There are 2-3 years of teaching available as history is only compulsory to year 9. Many start the GCSE course in year 9.
Generally the opposite happens. Students are taught a theme, say 'dictators' and then find out about different ideas of that over time with lots of stuff on similarity and difference (skills).
Personally I don't like this approach. It sounds very worthy and I can see merit in a comparative approach. However it suffers from the same problem of many more skills based curriculum. The students don't really understand the comparisons they are making in a meaningful way as they don't know enough about any of the dictatorships looked at. I prefer a much more limited number of topics, not becasue i don't like the idea of kids getting the big picture but because by teaching too much kids don't get any of it. I ensure the topics I do teach are coherent and help towards a bigger picture. I also ensure they know enough so when we look at skill based questions their answers are meaningful.

No I'm not RealLifeIsForWimps ... I'm saying primary schools start from the beginning I don't know what secondary schools do ... because this is the primary forum

camicaze it isn't my version of a skills based curriculum it is the NC version of a skills based curriculum

mrz

You sound eminently sensible, well-informed about the National Curriculum and keen to do the best for your pupils. (not to mention patient with your answers on here.)

But, this post is what is disturbing to most of us:

EBDteacher Sun 12-Feb-12 23:55:16
Problem is gaelicsheep if you up the 'content' of the curriculum there just is not time to do all three parts of your model...
If you asked me whether I'd like to you teach my DS all the capital cities of the world or how to use an atlas, I'd want the latter. Teach him all his times tables or how to multiply, again the latter please. If there was time for all of it, brilliant. But there just isn't.

But, this post is what is disturbing to most of us:

That there is a problem with having an overstuffed curriculum isn't the fault of teachers.

and even if the curriculum wasn't already bulging it would take a number of lifetimes to acquire a fraction of the current knowledge about a single subject

because this is the primary forum

[looks at thread title. shuffles off sheepishly]

at university I studied a particular period in history I didn't study everything that had occurred since life began.

I think there's room for people from both primary and secondary to discuss this - after all, primary has to prepare children to become students at secondary, and ensuring they have sufficient knowledge to undertake the challenges of the secondary curriculum should be important. It is a conversation worth having because perhaps the differences account for the vast differences in levelling between primary and secondary - students levelled at 4's and 5's who are relevelled as 2's and 3's in the first term of secondary, say, because they can't keep up and the interpretation of both knowledge and skill is so different...

yes there is but as a primary teacher I can't comment on how secondary teachers work

students levelled at 4's and 5's who are relevelled as 2's and 3's in the first term of secondary,
students externally levelled in Y6 are re-levelled in secondary I wonder why?
Actually we had a group of secondary heads sit in some KS2 lessons and they were amazed at the level of the work being taught. A few even confessed that they work at a much lower level in Y7 because they didn't realise what primary schools do. As a result some of our staff are going into secondary schools to demonstrate.

Of course you can! I'm not even a teacher!

RE: levelling, often the skills they could apply with one type of work in primary just don't translate to the increased language/conceptual demands of the secondary curriculum. This is a debate we have to have with the Education Authority annually .

One of our students, whose language understanding and expression is less than 0.001 of a centile (e.g. she has severe language disorder) somehow got a 3a in her English SATs. I would like to catch whoever levelled her, externally or not, and give them a great big thump! Most of the time her mother can't even understand her spoken language!

Levelling is never foolproof of course.. but there is very regularly a dip after transition.

A level 3 would be externally marked

I don't care if God marked it, it was completely and utterly inaccurate!

then your problem is with the external marking standard.

No, not entirely though it's a bit off topic. There is a difference. The SEN Officers in our area say it is pretty much recognised. Have you ever heard the phrase "porpoise children"? These are children whose special needs appear to "re-emerge" when there is a leap in the difficulty level of curricular content. There's really very little comparison between the type of vocabulary and concepts that children are exposed to in primary and secondary, and many children find the transition hard. This is why many secondaries use Year 7 as a sort of "bridging year" to soften the blow, keeping at least some structures similar to primary. Frequently, the "skill" that is levelled as x at primary becomes y at secondary because actually, the content has shifted so much that the application of the skill doesn't generalise particularly well. The structure of history, say, remains much the same as you posted above - yet there is a massive increase in the technicality of the vocabulary and the conceptual level of what's being taught. So a child's ability to put things in chronological order, or spot and discuss differences between things now vs things then becomes a much harder challenge.

Our team (which comprises of teachers/therapists in a language resource unit) has been doing some work with a group of Humanities teachers wrt one student, trying to explain to them that some of the concepts that are mentioned in another post above e.g.
democracy
revolution
communist
political party
monarchy
dictatorship
revolution
republic
are just totally and utterly inaccessible to this student, but that she can already do quite a lot of the KS2 curriculum e.g. comparing now and then pictures, categorising along a timeline etc, and that our work has to be to somehow bridge between these two... to use plain English and concrete examples that are meaningful to her to develop her understanding of these words over a period of time. Simply speaking, she won't "get it" in the timeframe the secondary curriculum allows.. so we need to do things differently, no matter how important these words are in terms of understanding history, yet it's not enough to just rehash the KS2 curriculum and lock her in at level of learning that doesn't challenge or extend where she's at.

There is such a gulf in understanding of the same skills "look" at primary and secondary sometimes. We've been doing some moderation between teachers and therapists of levels from primary and secondary and qualitatively there is a massive difference in how student performance is judged. Combine this with sometimes poor external assessment and the whole thing becomes very fraught.