My Diminishing Returns

  I’ve kept slightly detached from some of the discussions around curriculum that I’ve seen on blogs and CPD sessions in the last 18 months or so. This is partly because I’ve found it slightly too abstract and also that teaching Economics, I don’t have pupils for as long as most subjects so cannot devise a y 7-11 curriculum and have far less choice about what to teach. Having said that, I have recently read Kat Howard and Claire Hill’s book ‘Symbiosis’ and 'Gallimaufray to Coherence' by Mary Myatt which has inspired me to rethink how I consider the curriculum. In particular for KS4. My school start key stage 4 in year 9 so I have pupils for 3 years for their Economics GCSE. Previously I have worked sequentially through the specification but pupils ‘symbiosis’ has got me thinking about what the golden threads are that link the subject together and what the big ideas are that I want pupils to consider and how they can build on this through their 3 years of study. Before I d...

 I’ve recently been reading the ResearchEd guide to assessment as well as re-reading ‘Making Good Progress’ by Daisy Christodoulou as I prepared to write an assessment for my Y10 Economics GCSE class. I’ve been guilty in the past of relying on exam questions to get to what Daisy talks of as being the ‘final performance.’ In essence what pupils need to get to, is to be able to provide judgements about the importance of a variety of factors on an economy or firm. In order to do this they usually need some diagrammatical analysis and explain the impacts on different agents with a logical chain of reasoning. In a final exam, the way pupils do this is by reading an extract and then writing an essay explaining their judgement based on what they have read. The problem with setting this type of a question as an assessment and then analysing the results is that pupils could get it wrong for a wide variety of reasons. It might be they struggle to understand the case study, it could be th...