Best Practice

The death of teaching: A race to the Bottom?

Curriculum Whole-school issues Pedagogy
What classroom and teaching practices might we change in order to achieve better lessons and better teaching? In the final part of his series, Joel Wirth looks at key stage 3, which he fears is too often anodyne and pointless...

The discussion around the table was reasonably animated for a Tuesday afternoon at the fag end of April. As ever, year 11 had sucked up most of what heat and light the staff had mustered and spreadsheets had been extensively scrutinised.

At 4:10pm, the key stage 3 curriculum review session began (apologetically requesting just 15 minutes meeting time like the poorest of poor cousins). Ten minutes in and passions were running high on the subject of Shakespeare for year 7.

Macbeth was proposed, a lone voice advocated Henry V, the majority wanted to stick with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which had been trotted out in all its donkey-headed, fully-resourced-PowerPoint-a-thon glory for at least three years.

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