Last week, the Secret Teacher wrote about the problems that had led the CfE to be known as ‘Curriculum for Excrement’. This week, they’re looking at the positives, and how not taking advantage of those positives has led to ‘two very different types of schools in Scotland’.
Applied appropriately, the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) involves pupils developing skills at their own pace. One class consists of pupils at all different stages being given similar opportunities via tasks and activities to develop the same core skills.
Schools really embracing CfE capitalise on the flexibility that the curriculum offers, allowing teachers to design learning to suit the individual and collective development needs of their class. Those schools embed frequent opportunities for interdisciplinary learning.
In English, that might be pupils working as news reporters, thereby utilising and developing literacy skills, alongside calling on other knowledge and skills from other curricular areas like numeracy, IT, art and design, or graphic communications. An activity like news writing, which I’ve seen work well, allows pupils to develop literacy skills and skills for work in an environment that is more like the working world than a traditional classroom.
Pupils in CfE-embracing schools are given many opportunities to have their voices heard, and to be involved in making decisions that affect them.
Schools not embracing CfE look far more like traditional classrooms, with the teacher doing most of the talking and pupils all expected to do the same work at the same level, with very little account taken of individual learning styles, personal choice and previous learning.
