The curriculum in each subject can be accessed via the links specific to the year group. Subject specialism, led by well qualified and expert staff, is at the heart of our curriculum. There are differences in the ways that the curriculum is constructed and assessed in different subjects. Staff subject specialism is developed through internal collaboration, training, and through engagement with external advisory and training bodies, including teaching school alliances.
With a mastery approach, students study topics in great depth, with a clear understanding that they secure knowledge and revisit misconceptions or gaps in learning.
Key Stage 3 provides students with the time and space to gain this secure understanding. In our lessons you will typically see all students grappling with the same challenging content, with teachers providing additional support for students who need it. Rather than moving on to entirely new content, our higher attainers are usually expected to produce work of greater depth, flair and ambition.
Our approach to teaching and learning supports our curriculum by ensuring that lessons build on prior learning and provide sufficient opportunity for guided and independent practice.
Our Teaching and Learning approach is centred upon The Canterbury Academy’s Effective Teaching Principles. These principles can be placed into five key categories: expert planning, clear routines, questioning, modelling & explanation and feedback. These 5 strands are held together our golden thread of adaptive teaching.
Expert Planning
Our principles in this category hinge upon drawing upon teachers’ subject expertise to ensure that learning is carefully sequenced to focus on depth of knowledge and application. Planning involves building in strategic retrieval practice to both connect and consolidate learning. Learners’ needs are catered for through quality-first teaching, using additional explanations, scaffolds and models for both support and challenge, along with careful understanding of students to ensure that needs are met within the classroom in order for all learners to progress and achieve. Assessment must be meaningful, well planned and designed to inform planning for future lessons.
Clear Routines
Routines are embedded to our teaching model, starting on the threshold of the classroom and carefully constructed seating plans. We insist on ‘no wasted learning time’ through a prompt Do Now activity at the start of each lesson; clear end of lesson routines sum up and consolidate learning. There is a clear system embedded across the school for both sanctions and rewards in order to champion student learning and progress. Rewards in Years 7-11 students must be rewarded regularly for effort and progress through Arbor, postcards home, positive phone calls home and Heads of House newsletters. In Years 12-13 students are allocated a tier based on their effort and attainment, they receive letters home, rewards and sixth form leadership opportunities.
Questioning
Our approach to questioning places ‘no hands up’ questioning as our default method. We deploy a wide range of formative assessment strategies in order to include all learners and carefully identify progress and misconceptions. We provide opportunities for students to engage with high level discussions through ‘think, pair, share’ and guide them towards harder thinking and reasoning. Questioning must allow all students to reflect, think hard, analyse and create more questions for themselves.
Modelling & Explanation
We demonstrate excellence to learners through live modelling, employing strategies such as ‘I do, we do, you do’. Our teachers carefully include explicit vocabulary instruction and encourage students to ‘speak like the expert’.
Feedback
Feedback is integral in helping students move forward with their learning. Teachers provide feedback that is tightly linked to learning in a variety of forms. Live feedback is deployed whilst teachers circulate and assess progress; whole class feedback is used to address and re-teach misconceptions to ensure that gaps in knowledge are quickly closed. We encourage our students to be reflective learners, activating them as owners of their learning though a variety of methods; students engaged with purposeful, purple Pupil Improvement Time (PIT).
The Golden Thread of Adaptive Teaching ensures that learners’ needs are met in order to allow them to progress and achieve.
In order to allow the mastery approach to be effective (i.e. students learn what they are expected to in the year they are expected to), early catch up is essential. We aim to identify and support promptly students who start secondary school without a secure grasp of reading, writing and mathematics so that they can access the full curriculum.
The Impact of our curriculum
The impact of our curriculum is measured through several accountability measures, including those related to the bullet point list below. These contribute to the whole school self-evaluation. What matters most is the character our students build, their personal development, the contribution will they make, their independence, and what impact will they have as individuals in the community.
Accountability Measures
- Outcomes for students, including in examinations and qualifications
- Progress and attainment in each year group
- Destinations
- Attendance
- Behaviour
- Engagement in enrichment activities
- Student voice
- Progress towards the Gatsby benchmarks