Curriculum

We believe that every child at Halterworth Primary School is entitled to, and deserves, a high quality learning experience in every lesson, every day.  We expect that, and insist that, all teaching is consistently good or better with all teaching staff delivering highly effective teaching and learning in their class. 

Our aims are that our curriculum will be:

 CREATIVE

CHALLENGING

PURPOSEFUL

RELEVANT

RESPONSIVE 

Underpinning our work to achieve highly effective practice across the school are 10 core pedagogies:

• Building on previous learning: Foundations of new learning are based on a review of previous learning, scaffolding from where learners are and enabling rich questioning and dialogue. Teachers plan coherent sequences of learning to bring out key learning and explanations of challenging learning draws on effective models and representations.
• Active engagement: Through drawing on children’s natural curiosity and interest in learning, teachers pitch learning which is appropriately challenging. Learning experiences are designed to engage the imagination, and facilitate risk-taking, grounding new knowledge in existing schema. 
• Productive failure (risk-taking): Low-threshold, high ceiling tasks support learners to reach new thinking and deeper levels of understanding through mistakes and reflection. Doing so will build resilient habits of mind and a sense of self-efficacy.  Desirable levels of difficulty are designed within tasks to deepen understanding and and draw thinking to essential features of new ideas. 
• Explicit vocabulary instruction: Technical and enriching vocabulary instruction linked to new concepts leads to children developing an increasing understanding and fluency in linguistic choices.
• Talk agreements: The explicit teaching of routines around dialogue are taught, planned for and reflected on to foster exploratory talk in whole-class and small group learning discussions. Talk agreements reflect age appropriate dialogic aims and areas for improvement.
• Collaborative learning: Specific attention is given to developing independence and cooperative behaviours, the use of exploratory talk and metacognitive reflection on the process of group learning.
• Intentional practice: Children are given plenty of opportunity to practice new learning, developing fluency and confidence. Questioning and retrieval practice are designed to elicit connections, deepen thinking and achieve a high success rate.  Modelling, worked examples and backwards fading are used to develop confidence, understanding and independence.
• Responsive teaching including questioning: Through eliciting information about if or what children have understood, teachers adapt their teaching responsively both within and across lessons to support children to move forwards in their thinking. Teachers give effective feedback, with the majority of this being in real-time as this is where the biggest impact can be felt on learning.
• Facilitative learning environments: The learning environment sets our culture of inclusion and promoting autonomous learners. The classroom environment support access for all and supports children in using the meta-learning skills used in the process of learning. 
• Metacognition and self-regulated learning: Opportunities are regularly planned into learning to allow children to plan, monitor and evaluate their learning. Routines are established and explicitly taught to facilitate individual, small group and whole-class reflection on how to develop self-efficacy and learning intentionality. 

These areas inform whole school development through which we aim to consistently provide excellent opportunities for all our pupils both within and beyond their school experience and help support the development of our values of Curiosity, Innovation, Excellence and Respect. 

When thinking about how children learn, we refer to Dan Willingham’s Learning Model

1. Securing student attention. Student attention is a necessary precursor to thought. It's the portal through which content passes into the working memory. "Attention is the gatekeeper of learning." (Mccrae, 2019). If student attention isn't focused on the right aspects of the environment - even if that environment has been streamlined and simplified - they cannot learn.

Successfully directing and managing attention is how we enable students to process information. If a teacher hasn't got all students paying attention to either their voice or a resource, then they could have best lesson ever planned, but there won’t be any learning happening.

2. The working memory. This is the site of conscious thinking and it has a limited capacity. If we overload this, students will be unable to process information in a way that can lead to learning, even if their attention was exclusively focused on that information. Teachers can help to avoid cognitive overload by planning their lessons and communication to ensure students focus on a few ideas, processes or pieces of information at a time. So, for example, students might be attending, but what the teacher is saying might be complicated. Perhaps they are using words that students don't know. They're bringing in ideas from all over the place and students might not be able to process that in their working memories- so the coach needs to support the teacher to optimise their communication more effectively, or it’s not going to be processed in working memory and it will be instantly forgotten.
3. Thinking hard. Driving students to think hard about what we have told them. According to Willingham, "Memory [learning] is the residue of thought" (Willingham, 2009). When students successfully think about the content in our lessons, they learn. Teachers can help to ensure this by planning lessons based around opportunities for students to think about content, through simplifying content to enable successful thought and through ensuring students think about the right aspects of content during learning tasks.
4. Gathering and giving feedback. This is important to help students improve because, of course, information can go in and be thought about, but that doesn't mean students necessarily understand it all. Students arrive at our lessons with different experiences – different pre-existing knowledge and misconceptions. This means it’s almost impossible to teach a lesson without some students only half understanding new concepts, or forming misconceptions.
5. 5. Long term memory. When all of these things are in place, we think about consolidating that learning by committing it to long term memory. "Learning is a persistent change in long-term memory, not just a temporary increase in student performance." (Fletcher-Wood, Bignall, Calvery, Goodrich & McCrea. 2020). Teachers can help to ensure long-term learning by creating regular opportunities for retrieval [remembering] and practising key content.

As teachers, once we’ve communicated the right ideas, in a format that students can understand, we can push them really hard to think about those ideas, give them robust feedback on how to improve and then consolidate all that information.

Halterworth ‘Core 5’

At the heart of our pedagogy are our ‘Core Five’ teaching strategies that we expect to see used across the school.  These will be supplemented by other evidence informed strategies and WALKTHRUs.  Having a ‘Core 5’ helps to ensure consistency of approach and also helps to remove a degree of extraneous load as children are familiar with the teaching strategies being used in class.

Do we make the implicit, explicit to children?  Do they know how we expect them to enter the classroom?  How to collect their bags at the end of the day?  How to transition to a new activity?  How to lay their maths calculations out? 

We can often be very good at this in September but ‘enforcement fatigue’ can creep in and we can accidentally end up lowering our expectations of children. 

Expectations across the year will change and it is important that these develop as the year develops and the children grow in maturity and capability.  

If children are going to follow our expectations automatically we need to rehearse them many times.  We may also need to revisit the routines and re-practice if they begin to slip (beware of enforcement fatigue).  We first need to establish with the children what our expectations are; we can then use WALKTHRUs like ‘Signal, Pause, Insist’ to reinforce and ensure all children understand this is a routine that we expect them to follow. 

Remember, it is never too late to refresh or reboot.  If you are not happy, do something.  A whole class refresh and reboot can be a better choice than giving lots of detentions. 

Amongst others, Rosenshine stresses the central importance of scaffolding.  This WALKTHRU is supported by many others we use as a school, including: sequence concepts in small steps; worked examples and backward fading; tiered questions and problems; check for understanding and ‘I do, we do, you do’.

The central idea of scaffolding is that we need to be able to remove the scaffolds so children can move to a position of ‘independent practice’.  To do so we need to build confidence, fluency and automaticity. 

The Education Endowment Foundation report on Metacognition and Self-Regulation highlight the impact this can have on pupil learning.  They found that when used well, it can be worth the equivalent of +7 months additional progress.

Metacognitive talk is about narrating your thinking, making the implicit, explicit and talking through the problems that you, and therefore the children, face as learners. 

Model how to narrate your thinking as you explore a question; to say things you are thinking out loud, making a few notes. 

Metacognitive Talk ties in with other WALKTHRUs we use, including Process Questions, Check for understanding and Live Modelling.  Metacognitive Talk will support children greatly in being able to successfully complete independent practice. 

Rosenshine suggests that more effective teachers ask more questions.  If we take a hands up approach to answering questions some children will never answer a question and some children will stop even thinking about an answer as they know they won’t be picked.  In addition, hands up only ever really tells us who does know the answer, when it’s actually far more useful to understand who doesn’t know the answer. 

One of the key features of Cold Calling is thinking time, it is important we allow plenty of time for this and we do not fill this thinking time by talking over the silence.  This WALKTHRU links very well to Signal, Pause, Insist and scanning the room to make sure everyone is with you.  When we invite responses from the children we can then also link this to the Say it Again Better, Probing Questions and Process Questions WALKTHRUs.  We can’t ask everyone for an answer, but it is important to sample the room as one person’s response is never enough to tell you whether the children are ready to move on or not.