Welcome to my page for new and improved SLOP booklets for Physics GCSE. We do AQA Trilogy but most of the KS4 content is applicable for all boards. These booklets are free to download – I hope they are useful. Please see links at the bottom of the page. Here is a list of blogs... Continue Reading →
Categories are useful: words denote sets, and they allow us to talk with meaning. Exploring the meaning of words can help us to think more carefully about the delineation of the things they denote. I think we should probably spend a bit of time thinking about the categories of knowledge within our curricula. Words help... Continue Reading →
There was no doubt about the Magic this time. Down and down they rushed, first through darkness and then through a mass of vague and whirling shapes which might have been almost anything. It grew lighter. Then suddenly they felt they were standing on something solid. A moment later everything came into focus and they... Continue Reading →
The codification of curriculum into booklets or other documents and materials is a powerful tool for resourcing lessons and developing staff thinking and planning. This blogs outlines a useful sequence of steps for guiding the production of booklets – though as the first step suggests, a sequence like this should never be used as a... Continue Reading →
Booklets are a brilliant tool in delivering an ambitious, knowledge-rich curriculum. While a curriculum can never be reduced to booklets, it can be highly codified in them and in doing so is much more likely to be consistently enacted in lessons. The subject of planning with booklets has often been misunderstood: it is necessary for... Continue Reading →
Thinking about curriculum as a priority is relatively new for most of us, having lived through the poundland pedagogy years, and so it’s easy to view it as an important job to be started and finished. But this is wrong. Curriculum isn’t a task or a project. It’s not like a house you build and... Continue Reading →
“Man lives in the meanings he is able to discern. He extends himself into that which he finds coherent and is at home there” - Michael Polanyi, “Meaning”, 1975 What is the purpose of human endeavour? It’s not just knowledge. We seek beauty , expression, joy and delight. Art, music, literature and dance light up... Continue Reading →
The disciplines and school subjects are different from each other in important ways, and we must understand these differences in order to lead and empower excellent curriculum work. The discussion around these differences was started by the work of Emil Durkheim, followed by Basil Bernstein, with recent work by Karl Maton and the Legitimation Code... Continue Reading →
If you've already been to a researchED conference, you'll know that it's not like other conferences. ResearchED is on a Saturday. A Saturday! Everyone knows how hard teachers work, all the extra hours we have to put in just to get our normal, paid job done. Why the hell do teachers opt in, pay to... Continue Reading →
First can I apologise for the inelegance of the title of this post. There wasn't a more elegant way to say what I wanted to say. And that's what life is like isn't it? Sometimes there is a mismatch between what we'd like and the way things are. Regarding actions in a school, what we'd... Continue Reading →
In his book of 1971 “Knowledge and Control”, Michael Young saw knowledge as a tool of oppression and an expression of hegemony of the ruling elite but then by 2008 he’s dramatically changed his mind and says that knowledge is crucial for social justice, we should be teaching it in schools, etc. etc. He develops... Continue Reading →
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