Trivium 21c ltd.

Curriculum Shorts (Some short musings about curriculum) One of the best things about being an independent-minded teacher is that you can sit in meetings, smile and nod away at all the latest initiatives, work out how to pay lip-service to them and, then, when the classroom door closes go about your merry business in the Read more

Curriculum Shorts (Some short musings about curriculum) A curriculum should make sense. At first this might seem to be an obvious statement, who, after all, would pursue a curriculum that did not? And yet it is possible to end up with an incoherent curriculum if various factors are not in place. Firstly the planned curriculum Read more

Curriculum Shorts (Some short musings about curriculum) Interleaving two or more pieces of curriculum content that are deliberately chosen as they juxtapose well and/or offer interesting viewpoints and perspectives, and arguments can work really well. When I teach drama I interleave the three practitioners Brecht, Stanislavsky and Artaud. I start by looking at how each Read more

Curriculum Shorts (Some short musings about curriculum) ‘Spacing’ is a really useful way to improve learning and retention. Basically it means delaying before you re-study something. The opposite would be ‘blocking’, where a topic is learned over a period of a few weeks. This is a curriculum design issue as, often, teachers and departments design Read more

Curriculum Shorts (Some short musings about curriculum) In his book, The Process of Education, Jerome Bruner wrote that: ‘A curriculum as it develops should revisit… basic ideas repeatedly, building upon them until the student has grasped the full formal apparatus that goes with them’ This idea was central to the spiral curriculum. It should also Read more

Curriculum Shorts (Some short musings about curriculum) The T-Shaped curriculum idea can be thought of, quite simply, in this way: the horizontal line of the T represents breadth and the vertical, depth. The concept is prevalent in design education and also in other ‘progressive’ scenarios with breadth sometimes representing employability and/or multiple intelligences and the Read more