Mick Waters, the QCA curriculum director thinks we are missing an opportunity to be more creative with our teaching. “The challenge for schools is to create a nourishing and appetising feast that will sustain learners and meet their needs. Although the national curriculum is organised into subjects, it has never been a requirement to deliver it entirely as discrete subjects,” he told the Sunday Times.
“At the moment most schools are in the traditional mindset, which means they take content and divide it up into fragments called timetables. They do it as it has always been done. The idea of a new timetable is to offer less prescription and more opportunity to interpret the curriculum. Cutting across all subjects are curriculum dimensions; a set of themes including creativity, cultural understanding and diversity,” adds Waters.
Schools who have adopted this approach have allowed teachers to work in teams to produce month-long projects on certain themes. For example, history and geography can be merged with citizenship, or a teacher using a ‘chocolate’ theme, may merge geography, with the growing of the cocoa bean, science by melting the chocolate to prove that melting a solid to a liquid is reversible, and even literacy with books such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
The move to project-led teaching seems popular with teachers and schools. A recent Times Educational Supplement survey of 115 primary schools found that twenty-five per cent had switched to teaching lessons by themes in the past three years. Eleven per cent had started this method of teaching before that and 43 per cent intend to start to do so shortly.
Ofsted inspectors have praised some schools that have adopted this approach. It appears to be most popular with subjects such as history and geography and less so with maths and languages. Some claim that teachers enjoy organising lessons in this way, as it allows them more freedom to design the format themselves and deliver it in a more interesting manner.
However, there is no shortage of criticism either, particularly from the traditionalists. Many feel this theme-led teaching is already all-too pervasive in the country’s secondary school curriculum. Right-wing thinktank Civitas, recently released a subject-bysubject critique of the current curriculum with its report ‘The Corruption of the Curriculum’. It accuses the government of using the teaching profession to influence children socially, rather than to make them learn. “Teachers are expected to help to achieve the Government’s social goals instead of imparting a body of academic knowledge to their students,” it claims.
It criticises a history syllabus that has become less about facts than politically correct perspectives such as gender and ethnic diversity. It uses an example of the most popular history syllabus for 15 and 16-year-olds that requires children to write about the September 11 atrocities through the eyes of the terrorists. Chris McGovern, director of the History Curriculum Association says in the report that the students are invited to study the speeches of Osama bin Laden without balancing views from America.
The government has rejected the claims made by Civitas, saying the report is based on “a profound misunderstanding of the national curriculum and modern teaching methods.” But Conservative schools spokesman described it as “a devastating critique”. He told the Daily Mail, “We’ve got to move away from the anti-knowledge, anti-intellectual approach of many education reformers who have been far too influential in the development of the curriculum over the last 20 years. This has had a deeply corrosive effect on standards of education in this country.”
His views are shared by Alan Smithers, professor of education at Buckingham University who said, “People come up with these ideas for the less academic, but they wouldn’t dream of letting their own children be taught in this way.” And there are concerns that the new theme-based teaching will eventually lead to apartheid between state schools where it is gaining ground and the private sector where a more traditional approach is being maintained.
Last month, a petition was presented to Downing Street, signed by about 130 science teachers who are calling for the current GCSE curriculum. They are complaining about the removal of some of the academic content of the course, which now requires pupils to discuss pollution but leaves out a requirement to learn the periodic table in Chemistry.
The petition reads, “Many anticipated it as ‘science fit only for the pub’. Now at the end of its first year… science teachers (particularly physics teachers) are indeed judging it to be overly simplistic, devoid of any real physics and inadequate preparation for further study. This GCSE will remove Britain’s technological base within a decade.”
If this is the current situation, according to many of our science teachers, how will further theme-based lessons improve the situation? Will we end up with a nation of pupils conversant in concepts but failing in facts? Many with a longer history in the teaching profession will remember that this not a new topic for discussion. Back in the 1970s theme-led teaching was all the rage, particularly in primary schools.
Teachers were encouraged to emphasise “learning by doing” rather than traditional methods. But eventually the method was discredited when it was found that many pupils were leaving primary schools ill equipped for the more academic approach favoured by secondary school study. A landmark report commissioned by the Tory education secretary Kenneth Clarke in 1992 said topic-based classes led to “fragmentary and superficial teaching”.
The report’s authors were Jim Rose, Robin Alexander and Chris Woodhead. They criticised the ‘playschool’ method of teaching and recommended a more traditional way. Chris Woodhead, who is also a former chief inspector of schools, is still critical of the concept today.
“It’s harder for teachers to structure a coherent provision in the subjects that are worth studying if they’re trying to construct links between these subjects as well,” he told the Daily Mail. “It seems common sense that if you want somebody to make progress in a particular subject, you teach them that subject.”
Teachers from both sides of the divide will be reading the recent press reports about “trendy teaching” with heavy hearts. For once again it suggests an interference with what should come naturally to those professionals in their field – the best way to impart knowledge. The uptake of theme-based teaching in primaries suggests that teachers and students enjoy a more practical approach to their lessons and if this is the case, it cannot be such a bad thing. As for the introduction of more ethical discussions within the secondary school syllabus along the lines of environmental and racial issues, these too must have some place in a world that has changed beyond all recognition in the last few decades.
However, what is clear is that teachers are not happy with a “dumbing down” of their syllabus in favour of forcing links with other subjects. If those links occur naturally then all the better for those concerned. Who cannot remember valuable classroom discussions that occurred as a result of a poetry analysis or study of a historical event with echoes still resonant today? Students enjoy these kinds of discussions with their teachers not only because they can appear to be a “sidetrack” from the lesson in hand but because of their spontaneity. Take that away and the fun goes too.
5x5x5=Creativity is an arts-based action research project that aims to collect evidence about children’s life-wide creative capacities. Initiated in 2000 it originally involved five educational settings, five artists and five cultural centres working in partnership to support young children’s creativity. Since then 45 research settings have been involved across five Local Authorities: Bath and North East Somerset, Bristol, North Somerset, Somerset and Wiltshire. Artists, educators and cultural centres work together to support children in their exploration, communication and expression of creative ideas.
The aims of the project are:
- to demonstrate ways in which creativity and innovation can be fostered in and with young children;
- to influence educational practice by establishing creativity as an essential foundation of learning;
- to share the findings as widely as possible, creating a legacy for the future.
“Teachers are calling for ‘permission to take risks’, to finally take ownership of their own creative role, to be involved with research and learning themselves to enable young people to take charge of their own learning. If teachers see themselves as researchers alongside the children through discussion and interpretation of their own work and the work of the children, they are engaged in continuous on-going training and theoretical exploration. This process is empowering.
“We are developing a more creative curriculum, using the ‘subjects’ as resources to draw on rather than prescriptions for knowledge. This is a process which may be called an ‘emergent curriculum’ building on children’s authentic experiences and interests – it is not a deficit model ‘filling children up with content’.
“We are developing creative learning communities that value creative reflective practice – although we have started in early years we are planning to expand through primary to secondary eventually! This year we are extending into Key Stage 1 and also working with secondary students in documenting the younger children’s learning.”
“The 5x5x5 project has encouraged our children to identify their creative abilities. Children have taken staff on a real learning journey, highlighting their interests, strengths and the importance of their imagination. It has given the children the opportunity to express themselves and develop as imaginative and creative thinkers. From having time to observe and reflect, staff now have a deeper understanding of how particular children research the world and how they communicate their thoughts and ideas.”
Lucy Taylor, Head of Marksbury School
