When John Tomsett and I were working on our new book ‘Huh: Curriculum conversations between subject and senior leaders’ we wanted to explore the somewhat uncertain territory between the ‘knowledgeable one’ namely the subject leader and the potentially ‘less knowledgeable one’ their line manager. In some cases, a subject leaders’ line manager has the same academic background as the faculty, but more often than not, this isn’t the case.

In order to unpack this, John used the same format for each of the interviews:

• With a class of Year 9s in front of you, if you have taught them a rich, challenging curriculum, what does success look like in terms of what those students know, understand, and can do in your subject?

• If that is your destination, where do you begin in Year 7 and how do you build up to that point?

• What would you like your senior leader line manager to know about your subject?

And that basically is the heart of the book. From these simple questions, conversations emerged which identified the unique landscape of each subject, and which prompted further questions organically. From the recordings, we structured the chapters with the same format:

• We condensed the interviews from about 8 000 into 3 000 words, with a brief introduction to the history of the subject on the school curriculum

• One side of A4 overview of the key stage 3 curriculum

• Three documents/articles/books the senior leader should read

• Five questions the subject leaders would like their line managers to ask them about the curriculum. 

 And some absolute gold came out, as a result of this structure, for example:

‘You tell them that they will be talking in terms of how academic musicians would talk about music.’ Liz Dunbar

‘You know, you can start a programming lesson by asking students to write a sequence on how to make a cup of tea?’ Tristan Kirkpatrick 

‘When students claim they can “do” a language, they are really thinking about is whether they can speak it.’ Hannah Pinkham

‘Latin…the guilty secret of a student's weekly lessons.’ Dr Lucy Cresswell

‘Rescue a lumpy sauce to send a student home with a decent macaroni cheese; teach a student about gelatinisation and they’ll perfect sauces for life!’ Garry Littlewood

‘I’ve done a lot of work around sequencing over the last couple of years, so much so that my poor Year 7 students don’t do any biology until we get to about March time because we're far too busy laying down the groundwork.’ David Gash 

And finally, ‘Start with what the subject leader is really proud of and why.’ Claire Hill

Curriculum development is an ongoing process; it's not going to be finished, ever. And that’s why we have called the book ‘Huh’ named after the Egyptian god of everlasting things.

You can watch a recording of John and Mary’s webinar here via the free membership.