Autumn week 5

Mentor materials

Curriculum and subject knowledge

Learning intentions

Your ECT will learn how to:

Deliver a carefully sequenced and coherent curriculum, by:

• Using resources and materials aligned with the school curriculum (e.g. textbooks or shared resources designed by experienced colleagues that carefully sequence content).

Support pupils to build increasingly complex mental models, by:

• Revisiting the big ideas of the subject over time and teaching key concepts through a range of examples
• Drawing explicit links between new content and the core concepts and principles in the subject.

Help pupils apply knowledge and skills to other contexts, by:

• Interleaving concrete and abstract examples, slowly withdrawing concrete examples and drawing attention to the underlying structure of problems

Topic introduction

In their self-directed study session earlier this week, your mentee considered their own values around what education is for and used this to plan a sequence of learning, in which they considered prior knowledge and the core knowledge and skills within a specific topic. They then extended this by considering how students might be encouraged to think critically, and transfer their learning to new contexts.

In this session you will help your mentee to develop their topic and more broadly consider the way that school curricula are structured. This will involve taking the outline developed and considering how key concepts build up, how concrete examples support abstraction of key principles, and how a curriculum is resourced within your setting.

Meeting activities

Throughout the session, try to refer explicitly to the Learning Intentions, and encourage your mentee to record key points in their Learning Log below. Tailor your use of the Theory to Practice activities below in response to the review and plan sections of this session.

Review 5 mins

1. Start this session by briefly following up the actions that the mentee set at the end of last week’s session, which was to plan a lesson which retained core knowledge but also introduced values important to your mentee. Ask your mentee to summarise:
   1. what they did
   2. the impact of this on pupil learning (including how they are evaluating this)
   3. what they will do going forward to build on these actions
2. Clarify the Learning Intentions for this session with your mentee

Plan 5 mins

At the start of this module, you looked at all of the learn how to statements for Standards 2 and 3 and conducted a module audit with your mentee: in some areas they will already be confident and skilled; in others they will want more practice, and support from you and others. Look back at this audit now and use it to help decide how you and your mentee will make the most productive use of the suggested Theory to Practice activities below.

Theory to Practice 35 mins

Your mentee had the exemplification of Rachel’s Year 6 PE lesson (above) to help model their own topic plan.

1. Analyse artefacts Discuss with your mentee the topic planning that they devised in their self-directed study this week. To support your discussion of their plan, ask your mentee to articulate their thinking on the questions below. (And help them to extend and refine their thinking with the prompts that follow.)

   1. What are the key knowledge and skills within this topic? (And how could you communicate these to your pupils?)
   2. What educational values are supported within this topic? (And why are these important to you?)
   3. How does the topic draw on understanding of prior knowledge to sequence the content within the lessons (and any home learning), including key points of assessment? (Is their prior knowledge secure? Are they making common errors still?)
   4. How are critical skills and transfer considered within the planning? (And can you use a rule-of-thumb like EAR to help develop schema?)

2. Collaborative planning

Support your mentee in developing their topic understanding and planning a bit further. At this stage it is best if you draw on existing school resources (e.g. textbooks, and shared resources developed by experienced colleagues) to do this.

To support your collaborative planning, you could follow these stages:

1. Begin to flesh out the overview by considering what activities the pupils might do in order to further demonstrate and deepen their knowledge of the concepts and skills being developed.
2. If your mentee focused on a single lesson, then consider what would come before this, and what might be next in this topic within your phase. If you are focusing on a sequence of lessons, then consider in detail how the key knowledge and skills in the topic build up over a series of lessons. (You might do this by picking out just one aspect of knowledge/skill and developing a flow diagram or by annotating a curriculum overview to show how this knowledge/skill develops over time).
3. Now work together to add in and evaluate the examples and activities through which the knowledge/skill develops. This will help you and your mentee to consider the range of examples used and how prior knowledge is built on over time. (If you are using a textbook to help you here, you might see how you and your mentee could improve upon the set activities to make them more appropriate for the pupils they teach.)

Next Steps 5 mins

Agree with your mentee how they will now put their learning from this week’s session(s) into practice in their teaching. Help your mentee to clarify:

1. the action(s) they will take and how these action(s) are expected to contribute to improving their workload and wellbeing
2. what success will ‘look like’ in relation to these action(s)
3. how they will evaluate their success in taking these action(s)

Note the date of your next mentor meeting, when you will check on your mentee’s progress.

Finally, remind your mentee that they do not have another Self-directed Study session in this module.