The curriculum is at the heart of all we do
At St.Mary’s, our curriculum is shaped around our core values of ‘love, service and peace’ where every child feel that they belong. Our end goal is for all children to succeed, regardless of their starting points. Our curriculum is deliberately designed to give our children the tools and provision to know more, do more and learn more. Our priority is to improve teaching through evidence-led structure and practice, so that all children are exposed to exceptional teaching.
Our Curriculum Design
Our curriculum is designed so that subject coverage is planned sequentially and enables children to make connections to prior learning. Explicit vocabulary instruction strengthens cognitive connections. To help children to learn and remember new knowledge, opportunities for recapping and knowledge retrieval are key features of our curriculum to ensure children store knowledge in their long-term memory and can recall this with ease: transferring their knowledge into different situations and applying it to a range of contexts, whilst freeing up their working memory to learn more.
We provide a wide range of rich, first-hand learning experiences: exploiting the educational opportunities in Malton and beyond. Through teaching the full National Curriculum we aim to spark the children’s curiosity; ignite within the children a passion for learning; and uncover and build upon their individual talents.
Our Pedagogy
Our lesson structure and sequence is based around Sweller’s Cognitive Load Theory and Rosenshein’s Principles of Instruction. These principles enable us as teachers to engage with our practice at a forensic level, reflect on our practice and achieve the best possible progress and outcomes for our children. Rosenshine principles are based on three sources of research:
- Research on how the brain acquires new information (the science)
- Research on the classroom practices of those teachers whose students had the highest gains
- Findings from studies that taught learning strategies to students
Implementation
- Retrieval – This refers to the act of recalling learned information from memory (with little or no support)
- Explain and Model – the teacher model the subject matter clearly which enables the pupils to acquire new knowledge and skills.
- Check for Understanding –Teachers use a repertoire of effective questioning techniques in order to check pupil understanding and ensure they have understood words, ideas, concepts, explanations and procedures.
- Applied Learning – Planned opportunities for independent application in order for skills and knowledge to become automatic and embedded.
Learning is embedded in responsive teaching, therefore it is not essential to have every element of our teaching model covered in a single lesson, learning is a process. Teachers have autonomy about how and when they deploy the relevant tools and strategies to support the learning sequence.
Our curriculum plans are well structured and set out in a way which builds on prior learning, ensures high expectations and supports teacher workload. Teachers demonstrate a high level of ambition for their pupils and the ongoing use of questioning; vocabulary building and application are features of agreed pedagogy.
We place a strong emphasis on vocabulary acquisition and understanding when delivering our curriculum. We explicitly teach vocabulary and unpick word meaning. We have adopted a tiered approach to teaching vocabulary across subjects.
Tier 1 is basic vocabulary needed to function in everyday life, e.g book, girl, run.
Tier 2 vocabulary focuses on high frequency and multiple meaning words, e.g society, absorb.
Tier 3 vocabulary is associated with low frequency and context-specific words, e.g Paleolithic, oesophagus. Children will hear and often be able to read many of these words, but we also ensure that they have a good understanding of them too.
Impact
- Every pupil feels they belong at St.Marys
- Every pupil knows they are unique and have individual talents and skills
- Every pupil is able to display our St Mary’s Character in their everyday conduct.
- Every pupil acquires knowledge and skills preparing for their next phase in education.
- Every pupil, regardless of background or barrier to learning reaches their full potential.
If you would like more information about the curriculum we are following at St Mary’s, then please contact the school office and ask to speak to Curriculum Lead, Mrs Duffield.
