Recently, there has been some discussion amongst HoDs about Schemes of Work, with some examples floating around of ‘good practice’. We are fortunate at Shiplake that autonomy is encouraged, and that departments can design their own plans.
This leads me to these questions however:
- What should SOWs look like?
- Are they currently fit for purpose?
- What is their most important purpose?
- Are they designed to support teachers, or to give control to the HoD? Or, worse still, just to ‘tick a box’?
- Do they support teachers to be creative or are they overly prescriptive?
- Is it possible to plan anything other than a general sense of where the curriculum is going (i.e. order of key topics – even this might be disrupted if students show a particular interest in a connected topic), given that every class is different?
- Surely it would be better if each teacher wrote their own SOW for their specific classes each year, rather than following a prescribed version that cannot suit all classes?
The implication of the last question may not be popular. I think all teachers should have long and medium term plans about where they are intending to go with each specific group – this kind of plan would be a working document, and would show adaptation in response to assessment information (I don’t currently have one of these by the way – not on paper anyway!). Could we design some sort of planning document that enables teachers to do this, without being too onerous? Some people may say, quite rightly, that their Teacher’s Planner is more like a SoW than anything else they have.
The idea that a single document could somehow direct the learning of an entire year group, each with different interests and abilities, is surely restrictive and ultimately not very useful.
