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Curriculum Conversations: A Visual Approach

 Curriculum Conversations: A Visual Approach Thoroughly grateful, as ever, to had have the opportunity to share some of my reading, my thinking and my work at the researchEd National Conference in London earlier this month!  Thanks so much if you came along!  I have been interested in visual (and other) approaches to solving problems since studying a module on group decision making in my degree, back in the early 2000’s! The knowledge and skills I developed at that time had laid somewhat dormant over the years that followed, but since I have more recently encountered further ideas and writing on dual coding, visual techniques and graphic organisation, I have begun to fuse together my interest and experience from the field of management with my improved understanding of the importance of visuals in communication and processing.  Discovery of this very recent article from Csaszar, Hinrichs and Heshmati (2024) was very pleasing to me. They draw together findings from practitioners in the
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Classifying & Addressing Misconceptions

Are there different types of misconception? Does thinking about this help us to better identify them, prevent them and address them?  I am suggesting here that misconceptions may be classified into two types: - pre-existing misconceptions - instructional phase misconceptions (or ‘miscompletions’) If the student simply does not know something, this shall not be considered a misconception, but rather an ‘incompletion’. They have a gap, and it isn’t filled with something wrong, it’s just empty!  This post is in response to a blog named ‘Misconception?’ from Ben Newmark, you can read it here ! Thanks, Ben!
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What is ChatGPT? And what do educators need to know about it?

After registering on the ChatGPT website you are taken to a browser page. You can type in any question you like, and you will be provided with an answer. That’s what ChatGPT offers. It is a ‘chatbot’ and it is currently operating in a free ‘research phrase’ to collect feedback from users.   Great, isn’t that what Google does? ChatGPT is not a search engine - it is text only and it won’t pull information from elsewhere on the internet. It will give you answers using only the large body of content which it has been fed, so it does not know ‘everything’ and cannot address questions about current or future events. It does converse in a more ‘human’ manner than Google though, it’s maybe best thought of as a quiet, somewhat bookish, Alexa.  Why should I care? Home Study The content provided by ChatGPT appears to be of a much higher quality and far more specific than students could typically obtain from the internet via search engines. Users can obtain everything from compositio
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Subject Symmetry

Some subjects appear to be awash with books on how to teach them and writing on what constitutes a ‘good’ curriculum in terms of that subject. Wise subject leaders who are engaged in curriculum design would of course do well to read such material to help aid their thinking, as would senior leaders who are responsible for quality assurance.   But what if little or nothing appears to have been written about the teaching of or curriculum thinking in relation to a particular subject? Where does a subject leader go for inspiration? How do they know if their curriculum is any ‘good’ or how it could be improved? How might senior leaders attempt to quality assure that curriculum?  The answer is that the curriculum thinking must be done from scratch. Before any work can be started the parties involved need first to educate themselves in the underlying principles and concepts of curriculum theory. These generic principles then need to be tentatively applied to the subject. There is no other w
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Revealing the expert schema: Is your curriculum boring?

If I showed you a picture of how I think about a topic I teach it would be orderly and organised. It would probably also appear overwhelming and complicated if you were not an expert in this domain. (If you’re interested you can see the most epic of these, my ‘ macro map ’).   If I was going to teach you about this topic, I would gradually reveal elements of the picture to you, until you could see and appreciate the entirety of the big picture that I can see. I am trying to get you to a point where you can think independently like an expert. You will have the network that I have, so you can make the links I can make too, and then you’ll likely even make some I would miss.  This is frequently how I go about teaching my students. I will reveal, often graphically, very small and carefully sequenced pieces of my thinking, very gradually and over time, before eventually revealing the entire picture. The steps are small and the journey is leisurely, but long. You will get there, assuming you
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Optimising Revision Using Learning Science, and You Tube!

  “Revision?” I’m not a huge fan of the term ‘revision’ as it can imply that one should leave reviewing, recalling and, essentially, learning material until the last minute before an examination. However, it’s probably realistic to think that, regardless of what has happened during earlier months of their studies, most students are likely to want to increase efforts towards cementing their knowledge and exam skills in the final few months, weeks and days before they are tested. So, I figure it’s best to make sure that I maximise their chances of success seen as I now have this additional enthusiasm to play with!! I have been employing a whole variety of learning science inspired strategies throughout the course of the programmes of study I teach, so students I teach will have already benefitted from regular retrieval practice, spacing, interleaving, use of concrete examples, encouragement to elaborate, and careful thought about visual presentation (considering benefits of dual codi
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Back to the Future

Ensuring something happens in the future is potentially rather easier to achieve if you possess a time machine. In theory such a contraption facilitates your travel back in time to amend things that are wrong with the present before they happen, or enables you to leap forwards to tweak moments in the future for the better. However, as Marty and Doc humorously demonstrate, this isn’t always as simple as it might seem! For the rest of us non-time-machine-owning folk, our main hope for ensuring things happen in the future lies in the effectiveness of our ‘prospective memory’. As opposed to ‘retrospective memory’ (where we are trying to remember something from the past), the concept of prospective memory refers to our ability to remember something in the future. Will you remember to wish Lucy a happy birthday tomorrow morning? Will you remember to send Jack to the office at 12.20pm for their appointment? Will you put out the garden waste bin instead of the food waste bin next week? T
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