A friend of mine, a Quality Improvement Officer for the council I was working in at the time, once told me a story about a discussion with S3 learners during the final term of the year. They asked the learners “How would you chart your learning in S1 and S2 English and Maths?” Normally exuberant students looked blankly at them – until the QIO created the following line graph using their hands:
For many students arriving at secondary school and already working at level 3, S1 and S2 were considered boring. In subjects like English and Maths, they said they often repeated tasks (and in the case of English, even texts) used in primary school. In this dismal meeting with the QIO, they reflected that school was not engaging them – often they did not feel pushed due to lower expectations and no exams to prepare for. They stated they got a wake-up call in S3 as they honed subject choices and, in some cases, their classes were streamed - great for those who were at a perceived higher level of ability - not so fantastic for those who, for ability or behaviour, were punted into a lower ability group.
When I was told this, I opened my mouth to complain… but I realised that for many of my third level learners, I could see that this was true. How often had I introduced my text choices for reading – only to discover they had studied them all at primary? How much did I have a task that learners had said was something similar to what they did in another subject, or even worse, a year ago? I knew I needed to improve my teaching practice and provide engagement - or else the BGE years would be stagnant and thoroughly miserable for both learners and educators.
The Curriculum for Excellence sets out expectations that learners should enter secondary working at level 3 (see the information below from education.gov) but for many learners, level 3 is a distance away.
Encouraging and teaching learners to enhance their current level, bridge the gap, promote equity and provide challenge in a class of 30+ learners can make teaching BGE level classes difficult. We hope at Conduit that we provide resources which can make this more manageable, such as our growing range of First Level Literacy and First Level Numeracy and our Second Level Literacy and Numeracy range, both aimed at older learners.
Future blog posts will explore what educators can do to encourage progression at these levels; however, the question remains: how do we continue to promote learning?
Teaching Practice
Our Conduit blogs, such as this one on ‘Fostering A Positive Classroom Climate’ is a great read to get thinking about your class and this blog on Disciplinary Literacy promotes strategies such as scaffolding and critical thinking - but having high expectations, exemplars of good work and getting more able learners to teach others can also push learners to greater levels. Developing Learners’ Inquiry Skills – using classroom-based inquiry to allow learners to deep dive into a topic in the direction they choose, providing different methods of assessment and opportunities to celebrate success will all aid learner progression.
Looking at the curriculum.
This idea is controversial – but in an intriguing way. Whilst providing a breadth of subjects for learners to study is admirable, for many schools this is not achievable with staffing, school budget, and timetabling issues (to name a few), therefore a radical approach to BGE would be to reduce the subjects on offer.
Rather than having multiple lessons in a day, this approach would have teachers as leaders in learning and offer at least 2 hours of teaching with a group of BGE learners, who pick their broad range of subjects according to their interests. The benchmarks would be used to ascertain if a learner has reached a certain level, with multiple exemplars of work demonstrating their skill, but in a radical way.
Imagine P.E. for 2 hours: plenty of time to get a 60 - 90-minute game in and time either side for demonstration, reflection, feedback and changing clothes. Imagine a woodworking class with time to explain the lesson, create and provide feedback within the day. This time in History, for example, could be used to read a case study and focus on comprehension and research afterward. In Geography, students could have time to research or visit an area and explore the environmental impact in the same day.
In this structure, learners would be engaged (after all, they chose the subject) and excited to take part. Teachers would be encouraged to link their subject with their own interests, or indeed offer courses that are interdisciplinary: bike mechanics, debating, computer programming - the list goes on. As with countries such as Finland, these leaders of learning would be responsible for their learners and watch them grow and develop their skills over the year.
I was lucky enough to be on a panel of teachers who had the opportunity to review this sort of curriculum for my school, and we were so excited to trial it – until Covid and a restructure to ensure learners caught up on their curriculum scuppered the suggestion before it really began.
There is a lot to learn from the example above. Learners sometimes do not see the relevance of the subject and perhaps act out or are disengaged because of it. Despite not being able to implement this change, SLT made changes to teacher timetables and placed a larger focus on IDL - which was a great start.
Tweaking approaches to teaching and perhaps even the delivery of our current curriculum is the key to ensure BGE is what CfE set it out to be: a preparation for young people to become more adaptable learners and better equipped for a changing world.
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