I do a lot of curriculum work.
For quite a while now I’ve been trying to articulate something for myself with little success. This blog post has been invariably a Twitter post, a very long thread, and then a collection of notes sitting in my drafts folder for aaages.
Anyway, I met a lady last month who said that what I’m trying to explain in English curriculum is something which Physicists call ‘The Spherical Cow.’ There’s something extremely pleasing about the silliness of this idea, but it has also given me the language I needed to explain this. Let me elaborate…
Why is English actually quite hard?
English Curriculum planning poses challenges because there isn’t a widely agreed list of stuff which constitutes our subject. We don’t get a sheet of things from an exam board telling us which words, concepts and formulae to teach like you might in some other subjects.
Knowledge and skills in English are really complicated. ‘Knowing’ a concept for us has to go beyond being able to explain what something is. Students need to be able to:
- define it (e.g. X is…)
- identify it in a line up (e.g. which one is X?)
- identify it in the wild (e.g. oohh, that’s X!)
- link it (e.g. X affects Y…, OR X is caused by Y…, OR X is similar to Y… etc.)
- talk about its meaning in context (e.g. in this context, X is doing…)
- distinguish between it and other similar but different things (e.g. X is similar to Y because, but distinct because…, OR, I know why X is often mistaken for Y because…)
- understand how it interacts with other things (e.g. X is enhanced by/diminished by Y… or X changes because of Y…, or X changes Y…)
- be able to USE X: accurately, tastefully, deliberately (that can include deliberately UNtastefully!)
- be able to use X and reflect on it, edit, shape and decide, ultimately, NOT to use it in favour of something else…
- understand how X might operate in a range of forms, genres, and for different readers, audiences etc.
- aaaand usually they have to be able to articulate all of this knowledge through written as well as verbal means. Writing things down adds a whole layer of complexity.
So, getting to a point of ‘knowing’ in English is quite hard.
Where does the cow come into it?
The Spherical Cow is a pleasingly daft metaphor used in physics to describe how physicists often create heavily simplified models of problems in order to make highly complex calculations easier and estimates more possible. You can read about it here.
I’ve been told by friends who have studied sciences at university that, at A Level, they were told to disregard some of the things they had been taught at GCSE, because they were simpler models of far more complex ideas. They were told the same thing again at university.
In other words, teachers had created more easily digestible mental models for students to help them learn difficult things in an age-appropriate way. These models had been designed so that, at a later point, students could enhance their previous understanding, replacing it with a more sophisticated version.
Now, apologies to scientists out there if I’ve misunderstood this but, even if the last few minutes have been total nonsense, hopefully the next bit about English is on safer ground..
I think that it is our job as subject specialists to do the intellectual work of defining our curriculum. We need to:
- Decide what to teach and what to leave (DIFFICULT!)
- Understand that it is better to do fewer things REALLY WELL so that they can really ‘know’ them.
- For the things we DO decide to teach, create explanations and models which are accurate, but which might not give the full picture. We create our own spherical cows so that students have a chance of learning some MASSIVE and PROFOUND things in an age-appropriate way.
- Sequence our curriculum so that students can: learn these things IN CONTEXT; encounter them multiple times over the course of their years with us; and the end point is a deep level of ‘knowing’.
- Trust that, if they move on to further study in our subject, we will have equipped them with a strong foundation, and they will eventually learn that the cow isn’t spherical after all.
What could that look like with something like the DREADED fronted adverbial??
Let’s assume I’ve decided that this concept will be on my curriculum (it doesn’t HAVE to be, but just imagine…). I need to decide how I’m going to present this concept to students and what my end point is going to be. The goal, ultimately, is for them to know how it works, see how writers use it, and to use it themselves in a way which is enabling their own deliberate voice to come through.
To design my ‘cow’, I need to decide what the richest, most sophisticated version of this concept could look like. I could go big and explain the term adverbial in loads of detail – in linguistics, there is a lot to say about adverbs and phrases which function as adverbs. I could do the same with the concept of fronting.
But to make this concept one which is both accessible AND meaningful for my students, I’m going to do this:
1. Teach students that writers often put things in places on purpose. This can be at the start (front-), the middle (mid-) or at the end (end-)
2. I’d make this concept of positioning one which we come back to again and again in our curriculum. This works in every form, genre and style, and at different levels of the text. We’d talk about how poets open and close with interesting lines, and we’d notice moments of shift in the middle. We’d talk about how sentences can start with a ‘fronted’ whatever it is, but that we might also move it to the middle or the end to create emphasis in different places.
3. When teaching ‘fronted adverbial’ I’d keep my definition of adverbial to ‘an adverb, or group of words which is behaving like an adverb.’ And then the overall concept is as simple as ‘an adverb which is at the front.’
I’m putting this out there: I don’t really care what things you choose to teach and what you choose to cut from your curriculum. But I DO think that some curriculums (curricula?!) are too full for there to be a chance of really deep knowing. I am a massive advocate of being knowledge rich, but I think that that’s more effective if done with depth than with breadth in some cases.
Sometimes you have to cut off a limb to save the tree…
I think that sometimes English leaders feel a bit scared of cutting things. Perhaps we worry that, by taking something out, we are lacking in ambition for our students, or we are doing a disservice to our big, beautiful, intangible subject. I reckon we can relax a little. There will always be people who disagree with our curriculum choices. We aren’t defining what ENGLISH is here, we’re deciding what our students will study in English for this limited span of time. This doesn’t stop them from doing all the other things later. We don’t question why physics teachers aren’t teaching PHD level quantum mechanics at KS3. It’s normal in other subjects.
So, to make this difficult process easier, you could cut in these three ways:
- Cut by impact: go through your curriculum and highlight all the concepts you currently try to teach which are a bit wobbly. Which are the ones which you don’t think a student in Y10 could define properly for you? Because if they can’t, whatever you’ve been teaching hasn’t done the job. Decide – if it’s critical knowledge, re-sequence, re-plan and teach it better. If it’s not critical right now, get rid.
- Cut by frequency: map out all the concepts you teach (what you teach and which units they crop up in over the course of your curriculum), you will see which ones are really valuable because they are repeated. If you find yourself teaching proxemics but it only comes up once in a Y9 unit and never again sees the light of day, it’s probably a waste of time. Decide – if it’s critical knowledge, find the other places in the curriculum where it could appear: re-sequence, re-plan and teach it consistently well every time. If it’s not critical right now, get rid.
- Cut by streamlining: look at concepts which are really closely linked to each other, or which are covered by similar umbrella terms. For example, you might teach the idea of ‘suspense’ in one unit, and ‘tension’ in another. It might make sense to just teach ‘tension’ as your core concept (though you could obviously aim to teach suspense as a noun later on when teaching students to talk about effect). Another example I’ve seen is that we might teach two different names for the same thing because we’re teaching something like classical rhetoric. This often throws up things like pathos (also often described outside of rhetoric as emotive language) or exordium (which is, essentially, just an introduction). We might decide that we don’t need both pathos and emotive language, and that pathos wins that fight. We might decide that we can lose exordium and just call it an introduction for now.
CONTROVERSIAL EXAMPLES
(Note, these are my opinions right now, but in no way are they value judgements about what you are teaching in your own curriculum. Don’t fight with me on social media…)
If it were me, I’d ditch caesura, enjambment and oxymoron in KS3 and KS4. These terms are fine, but I don’t know what I would really want my students to do with that knowledge at that point in their academic journey – it’s VERY hard to say anything of note about caesura in poetry at GCSE level beyond making some pretty thin assertions. When they know a poet’s style better and see their work more holistically at Advanced or Degree Level, caesura is much more helpful. Oxymoron is fine but, apart from a couple of really good examples in Romeo and Juliet I can’t think of many places where I’d be able to show it in context. And even in that bit of R&J, we lose nothing by just calling it contrast for now and leaving the more specific term for when it’s more interesting later on (and it IS, trust me!).
If they do go on to A Level study, they will be far better served by knowing the other things I’m going to teach them really well, and learning these other things later on in a context where it is actually meaningful.
So what?
Make decisions about what you want to teach (I’m not making value judgements here – this is about doing the intellectual work and deciding what WE think we can do meaningfully and with depth in the time we have). Then teach those things really well, even if that means simplifying a little bit so that these huge literary and linguistic ideas can be grasped, digested and internalised. Greater sophistication can come later.
Anyway, I don’t know what I’m saying here, and I probably should have written a blog really (!) but hopefully that gives some people the reassurance or confidence they need to just cut that concept, define that other one, put a border around that vast idea, and build a curriculum in a really intentional and sensible way.
TL;DR
- Knowing stuff is cool. Teach concepts and terminology. But make sure you understand why, and that you make intelligent choices with the time you have. You don’t have to do it all when they are twelve.
- If you are teaching it, create models and explanations which are age and stage appropriate. Think ‘Spherical Cow’…