KS3 Curriculum Redesign

This was a task that I undertook with my boss, Frank Sawyer, to address what we saw as a shortfall in linguistic skills in the lower years of the school. Students were repeating the same grammatical and spoken mistakes each year and we needed to do something about it.

Our plan was to take the best of the British curriculum (the National Strategy for English at KS3) and combine it with explicit English language objectives. This was an interesting process, as it meant we had to assess the different sources for our existing curriculum and decide if they were relevant.

First, we took the NC framework and reduced to it to an achievable number of learning objectives in reading, writing and speaking & listening. The framework had always seemed a bulky and overly exhaustive document but this made it relevant and specific for our students. By actually engaging with the material rather than making unsuccessful efforts to meet all of its demands, we had taken ownership of its goals, adapted them to our purpose and made them our own.

Next, we divided up the different language objectives into the years we would expect to teach them and added them to the original list. This gave us the basis of what we would be teaching as we knew which objectives we had to hit in each year. We did not follow the framework exactly, deciding instead to focus on basic writing and more advanced speaking & listening in the first two years (Forms 1&2 / Years 7&8) and saved more complex writing tasks such as newspaper reports that would require use of the passive for Form 3 (Year 9), when we would plan to teach the relevant grammatical forms. We did not include media for every year, instead creating a media project for Form 2 only.

We then compared the current units of work to the objectives we had created. As before, we wanted to give our students the chance to experience whole texts of prose, poetry and drama. We also wanted to take on board the IB style 'points of enquiry' and sought to create units based on themes such as 'Dirty Dogs', 'Spies', 'Travel and Holidays', 'Fairytales' 'Making the Band' and 'Film Analysis', the latter designed to teach more complex essay writing skills at the end of the course in preparation for IGCSE coursework. We planned each unit and the relevant assessment outcomes so that the students' acquisition of the reading, writing and speaking & listening skills that had been taught were explicitly tested during each grading period. To assess the acquisition of the language objectives, 25% of the assessment criteria are concerned with the clarity and fluency with which language is used.

The majority of work was completed in the summer term of 2008. Once Frank left the school to return to England, John Kelly took over as Lead Teacher and I completed the majority of work on the curriculum myself. One further change that took was place was the inclusion of objectives based on a 'Big Write' course that John had attended which he was using to improve writing in the school. We included explicit objectives that dictated the different types of vocabulary, connectives, openers and punctuation that would be taught during each of the three years. We also planned specific 'Big Write' assessments that would be used to demonstrate students' progress in writing over the three years.

Once these were added, the curriculum was ready for the start of the new school year in August. It is John's plan to carry out a three year study on its effects, and current results suggest an improvement compared to previous years.