Our curriculums are too full, says Dylan Wiliam

[Piggywaspushed]

I love this article:

www.tes.com/news/dylan-wiliam-immoral-teach-too-full-curriculum

With all this concern (verging on panic), especially at year 10 end, about students missing out and needing to catch up when/if they return to school and dissatisfaction about remote learningand widening gaps, , and Amanda Spielman's frankly not that helpful comments yesterday , maybe it is time to think about the UK approach to learning and testing, and how much content we feel the need to stuff in to kids.

The bit that resonates is his comment about feedback.

Maybe there are some subjects which feel there is not an overload of GCSE content but the ones I teach have certainly overdone things to please Gove Ofqual.

I've sat through so many training sessions run by English teachers for example where it's all about going back over content and getting them to rewrite and improve things. In science it feels like we're shovelling things down them as fast as poss in a race to fit it all in. Especially as we teach mixed ability so have to do higher content in classes where there are students who struggle with foundation. We just have one very low ability set and I can teach them the same thing three ways as I don't bother with any harder content. Im teaching them subatomic structure and then they can't do 8 subtract 2. Sigh