One Thing Your Curriculum Documentation Doesn't Need (Unless You Also Provide Lesson Plans)

Garbled title aside, this blog post is a very simple one. And the message is this:

You don't need to mandate pedagogical choices.

You don't need to spend your curriculum-writing time on telling teachers how to teach.

Your curriculum documentation - your medium term plans, unit overviews, schemes of work, or whatever you call them - does not need to include information about how the content should be taught.

Your energy is best spent elsewhere. Namely, when writing curriculum documentation, ensuring that exactly what you want them to teach is made very clear.

You can leave it up to them as to how they will teach it.

Sure, you may have specific pedagogical approaches written into school policy, but you can still leave it up to teachers to apply said policy to the content outlined in your curriculum documentation.

Why Is Autonomy So Important For Teachers?

Allow teachers the autonomy to make decisions about which pedagogical approaches most suit the content. This decision-making is so dependent on a knowledge of the individuals in a class that it is pointless to spend time as a curriculum-maker writing how a teacher should teach something.

Yes, you might think it's nice and kind to do all the hard work for them, but really, teachers need to be able to make choices. Autonomy is one of the three basic psychological needs essential to wellbeing and motivation - why would you take that away?

Supporting Teachers in Making Pedagogical Choices

As a school leader, and/or curriculum-maker, if you want to have a hand in the pedagogical choices being made there are many other things you can do to support teachers that will genuinely support them:

• Co-plan: that might be a sequence of lesson plans in a subject or phase group, or an individual lesson, task or input with an individual in a coaching session

• Provide training: training which starts with curriculum objectives and demonstrates the process of making decisions about how best to teach a particular piece of content

• Give feedback: take a look at planning, talk to teachers, see them teach and offer discussion and feedback about pedagogical approaches

In short, be present in the day-to-day implementation, in the process of enacting the intended curriculum, in the reality of taking the curriculum from paper to practice. Don't believe your job as a curriculum-maker is done once you've typed the last word, saved it on the shared drive and emailed everyone a link.

When writing the curriculum, focus only on what should be taught.

When enacting the curriculum, focus too on how it is being taught.

Are Lesson Plans Necessary?

And to briefly address the parenthesis in the title: my personal opinion is that it shouldn't be necessary to provide teachers with full lesson plans, however if you do, it should be made very clear that these are for guidance only and that they should be adapted to within an inch of their lives to ensure they are appropriate for the class they are intended for. Teachers are overworked and curriculum materials are useful for ensuring wellbeing, but remember, some amount of autonomy is crucial to their wellbeing, too.