New GCSE Y10: Sequencing our Curriculum Map and access to new Teaching Resources

Like everyone in England, I have spent this academic year revamping our department Curriculum Map and Learning Journey to reflect the demands of the new GCSE.  I viewed the whole process as an opportunity to revise not only our curriculum for KS4 but also for KS3, while we redesigned new and more up-to-date teaching and learning resources for our Y10 students. 

At Princes Risborough School, we follow AQA. I do not like relying on textbooks for the delivery of lessons, but as this was a new syllabus, we decided to choose a textbook, which we could use to mainly, for reading and listening purposes. We went for the Pearson's textbook for AQA. 

Next step was to design our new curriculum for KS4 without depending on the structure of a given textbook, neither on the order of themes as per the AQA syllabus. In order to decide our curriculum map, it was important to think about our own school’s context, the depth of topics covered at KS3 so that we could determine a sequence of topics that would best suit our students, not the textbook or the AQA syllabus. This sequence may well be very different for another school.

The Sequence

In our case we decided to teach:

Term 1: Technology and Free Time + Assessment 1

Term 2: Celebrities and Holidays/Tourism

Term 3: Family/Relationships + big input on the oral exam and End of Year Exam 

It is worth mentioning that we started teaching the GCSE course after May half term when our Y10 students were still in Y9, as students at Insignis Academy Trust, get a new timetable and start their GCSE choice subjects in the last 6/7 weeks of the Summer term. 

During these 6/7 weeks, we covered the topic of Festivals with a big emphasis on La Tomatina as our star festival. 

Why this sequence?

As I mentioned the topics were driven by our school context and our KS3 Curriculum Map, to ensure progression. In Y9 students had been studying, mainly, the topics of Holidays and Tourism, so we felt that it would be great to start Y10 with something completely new to move away from fatigue. 

Throughout KS3, all topics covered, referred to talking about myself, so we thought it would be nice to start the GCSE course in Y9, following the pattern of holidays but in relation to a festival that students attended or would like to attend and which would require them to describe what people normally do there, moving away from "myself" and focussing on third persons: People tend to....

Following the pattern of talking about myself but starting to describe what others do, starting Y10 with the topic of technology was a good choice: it needed substantial new vocabulary while still being loyal to our 5 Magic Powers of key structures and will allow students to talk about themselves but also about third persons: technology can.... technology could...

The topic Free time really followed the path led by Technology, but it would require going back to talking about myself, the topic was also extensively covered in Y8, so we could start getting pace. 

After talking and understanding information about hobbies, learning about Celebrities made sense: a topic which, again, allowed us to move away from the myself realm and focus on another people achievements: the celebrities in different tenses.

Finally, after Celebrities, it made sense to go back to Holidays and Tourism and revisit all the vocab/structures learned during Y9; to finish Y10 with the topic of Family, revising key vocab learned in Y7, and take such vocab to a new dimension, as students could use previous  vocab in new contexts, to express a special occasion celebrated as a family, or activities they do together as a family, or what their family members had achieved, revisiting the vocab of Celebrities in a new context. 

I believe this Curriculum Map has worked for us. 

We have created two documents to go with the curriculum map:

A vocab/sentence builder booklet for students: 

Sentence Builders Y10 Booklet + Grammar   

An oral booklet based on the sample material published by AQA. 

GCSE Oral Booklet 

To access SoWs and curriculum maps for the new GCSE, click here

To access all our Teaching and Learning slides, following the sentence builders in the booklet and our SoW, click here. 

I created a Teaching & Learning Sequence for each topic, comprising around 50/60 slides per topic, with Listening, Reading and Oral material incorporated in the sequence. Writing tasks and materials created for our independent, listening lessons, once every two weeks, are not in the sequence. 

Curriculum Maps will change from school to school as they take into account the progression from KS3, the school context and the need to revisit vocabulary in different contexts. 

What is your curriculum map for KS4? Why have you chosen to teach a specific sequence of topics in a particular order? 

Feedback to Feedforward: designing a Marking Policy for KS3 and the new GCSE

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about how to tweak the KS3 curriculum taking into account the new MFL GCSE specifications. It was great to see that not much change was necessary per se, and the important goal, definitely for my team, was to put into place a rich curriculum targeted to reach Oral Fluency by the end of Y11, where real communication opportunities, international collaboration and cultural embedment in our SoWs were the key foundations, under the umbrella of a common departmental/school vision and what we know of cognitive science.

The next step is to create a clear Marking Policy anchored in meaningful feedback to move forward. It is what I like calling Feedforward.  I wrote about this in a previous post on different ways to provide feedback: Spinning the plates.  I wanted to design a clear Marking Policy that would not require my team to mark books every two weeks for the sake of it but would spell out different ways to provide feedback to students' work/performance in the classroom with the intention to check for understanding while providing clear steps for pupils to move forward. 

Nevertheless, it was important that we all had a common and clear benchmark against which to assess students' work for key pieces of productive work, especially towards the end of a learning unit. For that, I thought it would be a good idea to use the 5 Magic Powers + amount of communication/information given, as a way to help students to monitor their work and for us teachers to mark it:

1. Using more than one tense

2. Giving opinions

3. Giving reasons

4. Using reported speech

5. Using high impact expressions

The idea is to provide 5 points per Power, depending on how well each element  has been fulfilled/mastered in a productive task, giving a total of 25 points, similar to the new AQA GCSE Mark Scheme for Writing, and a further 5 points, in the case of Oral tasks to assess Pronunciation and Fluency. 

One may argue that real communication and fluency is not the sum of a specific list of elements, imposed on us, let's admit this, by the GCSE exam. In fact the new GCSE criteria for speaking and writing is very, very similar to the current one, at least in the case of AQA. I can't agree more, being fluent is more than that.

However, I see many benefits when using this benchmark:

1. We tackle some of the elements that will determine success in the inevitable final GCSE exam. This is vital. If students, as from Y7, are familiar with these elements and these are fully embedded in their language output while being fluent, in the communicative contexts when this is appropriate (we would not use 2 tenses or reported speech to perform a transactional conversation in a shop or a casual chat with a friend), the learning journey at KS4 would be much more approachable.

2. Students LOVE to know that what they are learning is actually something typical of a later stage, it makes them feel clever! ANCHORING IN CHALLENGE like Shaun Allison and Andy Tharby call it in their book Make every lesson count. It is the power of having high expectations, regardless of our students' attainment.

3. In my experience, these powers/elements work because students will always have something to say, which helps with fluency, developing motivation and self-efficacy. This doesn't mean that students speak in big monologues, but will always have something to answer when prompted with questions such as: What's your opinion on this? Why do you think this? and what happened next? 

4. The elements, especially the high impact expressions, are underpinned by real idiomatic expressions, frequency words and common verbs  that native speakers use constantly in their oral interactions: "puede ser" "suele" " puede que" " hace que" "ojalá" "si pudiera" 

Of course, this mark scheme shouldn't be used with all pieces of productive tasks but only with key pieces of writing/speaking at the end of a learning unit, when the communicative context is relevant and allows this criteria. 

When giving levels within the command of a Power: there are 3 levels with points assigned to it.

Let's take the Power: Covering the points of the task + Using more than one tense. 

There are three levels: 

Excellent command of the power, with a clear explanation of what it would be expected for this.

Good command and its explanation.

First Step: You are in the right path to command this power! This allows students to have a positive engagement with their work and a clear pathway of what is required to get to the next level. There's no failure, students just move up level at their own pace. This is important for resilience: Mistakes are the first step to learning!

This is, of course, still a working document, which I would expect to tweak, modify etc.. as the year goes by. This is the link to access the whole Marking Policy with the actual mark schemes for key pieces of writing at KS3, adaptation of the new AQA GCSE mark scheme for official end of year exams and the current GCSE KS4 mark scheme for timed writings and oral tasks for Y10 and Y11. 

Marking Policy example

Tweaking the Curriculum for the new GCSE

As you know, I am starting a new job in September as Head of MFL in a comprehensive school near Oxford, Princes Risborough School. Talking to my new team, it was obvious that they are super talented and really committed, as well as the SLT, to raise the profile of MFL across the school. MFL is an option at GCSE and we would like more students to choose it as option at the end of Y9!!  

"Languages, a LIFE skill to achieve"

I had a preliminary meeting with my new team in May to establish the priorities of the department using the SWOT analysis diagram:  Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.  This led the path for our vision: For MFL to become a popular, established choice for students at GCSE with great results and make sure that pupils saw the benefits of learning a new language.  We came out with a Mission Statement that summarised this vision: Languages, a LIFE skill to achieve. This vision/mission statement would drive our curriculum: students should choose MFL for GCSE because it is a LIFE skill and must be learned and nurtured. 

To make the connection between LIFE skill and what happens in the classroom, we agreed that being able to communicate ORALLY at the end of the language journey had to be a must for the students, so our curriculum should be focussed on developing FLUENCY. 

To achieve this, we would use our knowledge of Cognitive Science, the benefits of a Lexicogrammar approach to language learning and applying Rosenshine's Principles to our teaching pedagogy, without forgetting the power of gamifying the curriculum, for real communicative tasks, even when these are just a drilling exercise, part of the learning process and, of course, Project Based Learning, as the reason why a unit will be taught, which will connect what we teach to a purposeful, meaningful, real to life scenario.  At this point we agreed that we would involve our partner school links as much as possible, so that at the end of each taught unit, students would have the opportunity to speak/present what they had learned to a real native audience. 

Tweaking the curriculum: LESS IS MORE and PROJECT BASED LEARNING

Last week we met to actually design a new curriculum for KS3, which would take into consideration all these elements, as well as the elements of our new GCSE for languages. 

Below you can find the presentation I use with my team to give a rationale to our new Curriculum. It was lovely to see that actually, the topics for KS3 would be the same as studied so far! We just had to take into consideration the new vocab lists for AQA/Edexcel and tweak some of the content to make sure that as much of that vocabulary list was learned during KS3.

We also decided that LESS is MORE, so we would teach just a unit/topic per term, to allow time for students to really practise the topic, embed structures, teach grammatical points and be creative with the language to, finally, become fluent in that topic.

5 Magic Powers to help Fluency and Embed Exam Skills

Finally, we agreed to use 5 Magic Powers, our non-negotiables, which would be the common thread across the whole curriculum. I have talked about the 5 Magic Powers before in this blog. I love them, because, not only they are success criteria for productive skills at GCSE level, even with the new GCSE, but they help my students to be able to speak and be fluent, as these powers are so embedded in all our lessons. 

If I ask my students: what do you do in your free time? They will always have something to say: an activity, an opinion, a reason, reported speech sentence, more than one tense and some extremely colloquial and common expressions, high impact expressions as students learn a few formulaic expressions for each power element, throughout the curriculum to be used in any context. By doing this, students not only speak but they embed the elements that will score them points later in their GCSE exam. We teach them to speak and give information and, by default, they will score highly in their exam.  

Finally, let's not forget, that at the end of each unit, students will have the opportunity to put the language (vocabulary, register and grammar) into practise via a real-life situation task: Taking part in little drama sketch performed in assembly, talking to our partner schools on a given topic/presentation, pitching for the best holiday experience to be featured in a digital travel blog, taking part in a film review competition, taking part in a school treasure hunt with the studied topic as the theme for this etc...

The 5 Magic Powers:

• Using more than one tense
• Give opinions
• Give reasons
• Using Reported Speech
• Using some idiomatic/high impact expressions, so you sound like a Spaniard/French speaker.

For the Magic Powers to have effect, they will need to be taught and practised constantly, throughout the learning journey at KS3, in all the units: that's why less is more!! Fewer units, more time to learn lexis and grammar and more time to embed skills.

The next step is to create the content for the units: via Sentence Builders, using  the material in textbooks, the new GCSE vocabulary lists and our knowledge of the language as specialists and create a mark scheme to mirror the curriculum. To create our sentence builders we are using the site Sentence Builders, super fast to create + lots of interactive activities to go with them! I will share mine once I create them. 

This is the language journey to share with students.

It's coming home!: the new MFL GCSE Proposal, let's be positive!

Yesterday, the DfE published the outcome to the consultation for the revised GCSE Qualification for MFL. It can be found here.  I wrote my thoughts on the original proposal in this blog here, where I outlined what I liked about the proposals: 

• The rational behind the proposals, which is difficult to argue about: the current GCSE is too inaccessible as it has too many topics, too many words to master and too many words that need to be inferred by context, meaning that it advantages bilingual candidates and high ability students with better literacy skills. The proposed GCSE aims to close this gap and make languages accessible to all as it removes guesswork and rewards hard work. An honourable aim, although, we all know that grading is the big elephant in the room when it comes to MFL in this country and no reform will be successful until, harshness in MFL is tackled and reduced!
• Glossed vocabulary
• Questions in English for the Listening and Reading papers
• The importance of phonics in the curriculum
• A reduction of the content that students need to master: less is more!

However, I had the following reservations:

• The use of a specific list of vocabulary, where 90% of its content would come from the 2000 most frequent words occurring in the language, which meant there was not a lot of content vocabulary which would allow students to talk/write about interesting topics, especially if we want to refer to cultural topics. The revised version has reduced that percentage to 85%, a minor improvement, and now talks about word families not just words, which gives some space for manoeuvre. 

• The notion of not having Themes/Topics and the clear emphasis on grammatical acquisition, at the expense of communication, which it is still there, was another thorny issue for me: if themes or topics are no more, productive skills must be based pretty much around grammatical productivity, neglecting communication in the process. I am pleased, this is not the case anymore, and in the revised document, allows for a limited number of broad themes or topics relating to the countries (culture) where the target language is spoken. 
• My final reservation was about seeing a distinctive pedagogical background in the review, imposing a structuralist approach to teaching MFL, extensively supported by NCELP. That it is pretty much still the case. Not any other GCSE specification suggests methodology but just content.

Steve Smith analyses beautifully the new proposal review in this blogpost here, a must read!

WHAT NOW? 

Well, it looks like the proposals are coming home. However, whether we agree with the changes or not, we need to put things into perspective. 

We all are professionals, who aim to achieve fluency and real communication in our students while developing a cultural understanding of the countries where the target languages are spoken. 

That should still be the centre of our curriculum language journey and we should not disregard the resources and language roads we have mapped out in our schools so far. 

Some points to consider in preparation for the new GCSE to be first taught from September 2024:

• The importance of phonics in the lessons, this is already happening in many, many schools. Such work can be done with a lexicogrammar approach to teaching, I certainly do. In fact, if you follow an EPI approach, modelling is all about phonics, while the use of dictations and reading aloud are key in language acquisition and integral part of EPI.

• Make sure that your KS3 SoWs include as many of the family word lists proposed by the DfE as possible. This does not require a lot of work but rather tweaking your vocabulary content in your SoW. If you use Sentence Builders, it will need just minor adjustments so that we can make sure that students are exposed to the appropriate vocabulary. Because a specific list of words has been published, this task is relatively easy to achieve.

• Grammar is key in the new proposal, but it is key in any language acquisition journey and SoW, and certainly the current GCSE relies on manipulation of the language, one of its best features. If you follow a Lexicogrammar approach, grammatical mastery is key to be able to manipulate the language and communicate freely moving away from Sentence Builders. I can certainly see this happening with my students now!

Overall, the message I would like to send with this blogpost, is that the new proposal should not change our approach to language learning and our goals should remain the same. We shouldn't reinvent the wheel, rather adapting what we do so that we tackle the new exam format and, for that, we need to wait for the Boards to come out with a new specification. 

At the moment we should enjoy the wonders of teaching languages and seeing our students become good communicators.