\nThe first maths curriculum we designed at King Solomon Academy didn’t work – at the end of year 7 our students hadn’t learned what we’d taught them.<\/p>\n
That summer (2010), we went away wondering what we’d done wrong and came to appreciate the following flaws in the original curriculum:<\/p>\n
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- Flaw #1 – There’s so much to learn that we have to keep moving on.<\/strong> It turns out you don’t have to keep moving on – not at the expense of pupils actually learning what you’re trying to teach them. Yes, there’s plenty for them to learn but we don’t need to cram so many concepts into one year.<\/li>\n
- Flaw #2 – They might not get it now but we’ll come back and teach it again in year 8 and 9 and *then* they’ll get it.<\/strong> We falsely reassure ourselves that they’ll understand it next time, however, the chances are they won’t. Why? Because if they didn’t understand it this time round, they probably don’t have the underlying skills they need to access what you’re teaching them and you probably don’t have time now to re-teach this for very long before you have to move on to the next topic. The tragedy is that year on year we keep piling on more things and we get to year 11 with a massive maths deficit.<\/li>\n
- Flaw #3 – This is the way most other maths departments and publishers organise their curriculum so they *must* be right, with all their years of experience.<\/strong> Obviously a broken argument if they’re not right after all.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
In short, we were moving the topic on too quickly (roughly every two weeks) and we were teaching “over” an insecure understanding of place value and poor recall of the basic number facts. We didn’t give our pupils a fair chance at learning when these factors were stacked against them.<\/p>\n
What we moved away from<\/strong>
\nHere’s a snapshot of a year 7 curriculum that someone sent us recently, very very similar to the one that we started with 5 years ago:
\n![\"Nonmastery](\"http:\/\/mrreddy.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/Nonmastery-curriculum.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nWith the experience the last 4 years has given us, these are our observations:<\/p>\n
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- No real time is given to the 4 operations or place value. It’s critical to spend 7-13 weeks on place value and the 4 operations unless you’re teaching a whole yeargroup of level 5s and above.<\/li>\n
- Not enough time is spent on fractions (needs 6 weeks) or on algebra basics (needs 5 weeks)<\/li>\n
- Area and perimeter are being taught together (should be as separate as possible)<\/li>\n
- Mean, median and mode are being taught together (should be as separate as possible)<\/li>\n
- Reflection, rotation and translation are being taught together (should be as separate as possible)<\/li>\n
- The following don’t need to be taught at all – tessellations, function mapping<\/li>\n
- The following don’t need to be taught in year 7: ratio, probability, transformations, functions and graphs, sequences, units of measurement, describing data, comparing sets of data<\/li>\n
- Algebra comes up too soon in the year – save it until half-term 5<\/li>\n
- Generally it’s trying to cover too much in too little time or in the wrong order (e.g. probability comes before fractions, although we’ve suggested probability doesn’t even need to appear in year 7) or together with concepts that are minimally different and likely to get confused (area\/perimeter, mean\/median\/mode, reflection\/rotation\/translation).<\/li>\n
- Too much chopping and changing doesn’t allow the pupils to get a footing in any of the topics before they’ve moved on, especially in schools that only have 3 hours a week of maths.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
(Note: We were also sent a detailed breakdown of the curriculum, which is why we’re able to refer to things like tessellation and transformation that don’t appear on the overview.)<\/p>\n
What we moved to<\/strong>
\nThis is a snapshot of the King Solomon Academy KS3 curriculum:![\"KSA](\"http:\/\/mrreddy.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/KSA-KS3-Overview1-1024x567.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nYou should notice that more time is given to number work at the beginning of year 7 (especially times tables<\/span><\/a><\/span>), we spend one half-term at a time teaching a topic rather than 2 weeks<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/span>, some things are ‘missing’ (because they’re taught in KS4), we’ve tried to separate minimally different concepts and we’ve thought carefully about the order things are taught in so that all the while we’re building on top of prior learning.<\/p>\n
- Flaw #2 – They might not get it now but we’ll come back and teach it again in year 8 and 9 and *then* they’ll get it.<\/strong> We falsely reassure ourselves that they’ll understand it next time, however, the chances are they won’t. Why? Because if they didn’t understand it this time round, they probably don’t have the underlying skills they need to access what you’re teaching them and you probably don’t have time now to re-teach this for very long before you have to move on to the next topic. The tragedy is that year on year we keep piling on more things and we get to year 11 with a massive maths deficit.<\/li>\n