Our Curriculum
BIG IDEAS
A CROWCROFT PARK CURRICULUM APPROACH
At Crowcroft Park we teach the full National Curriculum through lessons that are sequenced and progressive and full of rich and interesting knowledge and ideas.
We serve a challenging demographic where deprivation, mobility, SEND and EAL are all high and children face multiple vulnerabilities. Our children do not always join our school with the broad, embedded schema or ‘cultural capital’ that is the essential foundation for new learning. Movement between schools and countries creates gaps in prior learning.
We therefore take a ‘BIG IDEAS’ approach.
We do not provide knowledge organisers or ask children to remember long lists of facts (although these are present in teaching) as without strong foundational schema these cannot be retained. No matter how well sequenced, these facts would become disconnected and lost.
Instead, we emphasise conceptual knowledge and teach this ‘hard’. Our goal is to build up strong schema that are discipline (subject) specific so that children can make sense of (and thereby retain) new knowledge.
Children will leave our school with a broad collection of strong schema, each one enriched with a selection of relevant and detailed examples.
We want our children to think and act like historians, designers, scientists… and be well prepared to begin their secondary learning journey.
THE SCHEMA APPROACH EXPLAINED
When new information is presented, the human brain tries to make sense of it by linking it to prior learning or schema. When these schema are well developed and organised, new learning ‘sticks’ easily.
When schema are poorly developed or there are significant gaps and misconceptions in prior learning, new information has nothing to stick to and cannot easily be retained. The Matthew Effect explains that for children with low prior knowledge, gaps get bigger and learning becomes increasingly difficult.
In order to retain new learning so that it is accessible, children must repeatedly retrieve it from their long term memory, building strong neural pathways. At Crowcroft Park, this is achieved through our Go Fetch approach.
THE BIG IDEAS APPROACH EXPLAINED
Crowcroft Park subject specific Big Ideas help to create schema and avert the Matthew Effect. Throughout the curriculum, children return again and again to the Big Ideas, adding more and more rich ideas and examples (sequenced progressively through medium term curriculum documentation). When links are made to prior learning, memory becomes more stable and durable. Teachers therefore intentionally link new learning to things that children already know. This approach provides a strong foundation of learning that acts as a springboard for secondary education.
In the example above, teachers emphasise the Big Idea in Science that there is a relationship between form and function. They return to this repeatedly, adding new examples. The relationship between form and function also comes up in Writing and Design. Children thereby build a strong schema and new learning ‘sticks’.
If you would like more information about the curriculum, please feel free to ask at the school office or speak with your child's class teacher. We're happy to assist!