Exploring Learning

In my last post, I wrote about making space for deeper learning. I reflected on a principle that has increasingly shaped my thinking about curriculum design: do less, better. Not less ambition or lower expectations, but greater intentionality about what deserves students' time, teachers' attention and the limited cognitive space available for learning. This week, my reading has pushed that thinking one step further. If we are going to remove things from learning, we need to be very clear about what we are removing, because there is an important difference between removing a barrier and removing the thinking. Cognitive load has been something of a red thread woven through my work with teachers and learners since I first stepped into my current role. It has shaped conversations about curriculum breadth, lesson design, assessment, instruction, scaffolding, collaboration and the increasing number of systems students are expected to navigate. Much of our curriculum work over the pas...

  Why collaborative planning and responsive teaching need each other There is a tension in teaching that I keep returning to. We need to plan well. We need coherent curriculum, shared learning intentions, thoughtful assessment, and collaborative decisions about how we will design learning. Yet once students enter the room, the plan cannot become the thing we are trying to protect. The plan is not the learning. Perhaps a better way to think about it is that the plan is our best shared hypothesis about how learning might happen . Then teaching begins, and we find out. Planning matters This distinction matters because responsive teaching should not be an argument for everyone doing their own thing. Collaborative planning is fundamental to creating a coherent experience for students. Teams need shared clarity about what students are learning, the conceptual understandings that matter, what successful learning might look like and the experiences likely to help students get there. Marsch...

  At the end of the last academic year, I wrote about the work of untangling the threads . I reflected on several years of sustained work to create greater clarity and coherence across curriculum, assessment, pedagogy, and collaboration.  When I first stepped into my role in 2022, many of those elements felt like threads within a tangled ball. They were all connected, but it was not immediately clear which thread to pull first, or whether pulling too hard in one direction might tighten the knot elsewhere. I decided to begin with the written curriculum. Not because documentation itself was the goal, but because shared clarity about what students should understand, know, and be able to do provides the foundation for everything else. It allows teachers to make more purposeful decisions about learning design, assessment, feedback, access and challenge. It creates a common language for collaboration and helps connect what is intended, what is taught, what is assessed, and what stud...