Earlier this year I catalogued the many insights gleaned from educational experts which have been most influential in my curriculum thinking, in a post entitled, This much I know about… the principles of curriculum planning in action. In a series of short essays I am exemplifying in more detail ten of those influential insights, and explaining why I think they are so important to progressing pupils’ learning. This post explores Becky Allen’s insight that curriculum is the complex, dynamic interplay between content, adaptive teaching and assessment, and if any one of these three curriculum pillars is out of kilter, the curriculum falls over like a badly made three-legged stool.
I go on a lot about what I have dubbed the “curriculum triumvirate”. Curriculum is the complex, dynamic interplay between content (what you want pupils to learn), adaptive teaching (how you teach pupils in a way that they best learn) and assessment (finding out whether they have learnt the content you have taught them). I have written in the past about the relationship between the three elements of curriculum in detail.
When developing a unit of work, you need to think about all three elements of the triumvirate. If you just spend time on content – without thinking hard about how to teach that content in a way that pupils will learn it, and how to find out whether pupils have learnt what you have taught them and what to do if they haven’t learnt it – you have only engaged in one third of the job of curriculum development.
