One of the recurring themes at CurriuculumEd was about making sure that the curriulum is controlled by teachers. This makes sense, they know their students, they know ability and they have different passions. Teaching is about passion, and maths teachers do have the same amount of passion as any other teacher. People easily understand that a history teacher finds the tutors more interesting than the great depression, but then they find it strange that a maths teacher may be passionate about how fractions work but less so about Pythagoras’ theorum.

Fueled by the national curriculum the push to pre-write every lesson of a curriculum and mandate what topics should be taught, and when is a crazy idea. Whether it’s done by prescribed powerpoints or by narrow testing that has to be taught to. As I said in the circles post, the idea is not that we narrow things down to set topics (such as area of a circle) but bigger themes (rearranging and subsitution) and allow the teachers to chose the correct leel and context for their class.

Going back to Claire Sealey’s concept of curriculum as a box set, my idea is to have three serials in year 7. All with their own episodes, and all set in the same universe but with their own discrete themes (obviously the cross over episode where supergirl, flash and arrow team up will happen throughout the journey)

By making these themes broad enough to allow the teachers to control their own curriulum you give control back to the teachers and the ability to allow their passion for the subect to shine. The over aching theme would be the same in every classroom, but the journey to get there would be controlled by the teacher.

At the moment, my idea for the three big themes are… Numbers and the number system (with a focus on place value and metric measures), Rearranging and Using Formulae and Proportional Reasoning. There is a lot of content in the KS3 maths curriculum – but my gut feeling is that a student who finishes year 7 with a deep understanding of place value, the metric system, four operations, rearranging forumlae and proportional reasoning has the tools to allow them to reason, to problem solve and to to understand the next steps of mathematics in all subjects.

The next question, is how does this work for a high ability year 7 student, how do we put challenge in and movement from the KS2 Curriculum.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/239058/SECONDARY_national_curriculum_-_Mathematics.pdf