Sharing is…fun!

The case for low-variance curriculum.

The actual gardens from where this anecdote comes.

As you might know, before moving to Australia in 2023, I lived in Muscat in the Sultanate of Oman. For our last couple of years there, my wife and I lived in a villa in small compound with a shared swimming pool and communal gardens.

We’d spend a lot of time outside in the gardens and we got to know the kids who played there. My wife was like Snow White. She’d go out there and all the kids would flock to her, want to speak to her. She’s always been so good with kids. One particular day she was talking to one of little girls who had been quarrelling with another little girl over a toy. My wife - keen to try and pass on some wisdom - said to her: “Sharing is…” expecting her to say “caring”. But instead she said “fun”. My wife and I found this both adorably cute and funny and it is something we say in the house often, including to our toddler.

My school gets a lot of visitors. We have a team that takes care of showing visitors around and organising the day. Sometimes the visitors are prospective parents, sometimes they are teachers or leaders from other schools.

In the last couple of months, we have had some visitors specifically to the French department. They have observed me teaching my Year 7s and then we’ve had lunch together and we have discussed our approach. We have also usually done a quick tour of the school too, time permitting. Most of the time, these visitors are in the early stages of implementing EPI (Extensive Processing Instruction) and are keen to understand a little more about how it looks in practice. We are always happy to share what we do and think to help other schools do the same, if they wish to.

Having conducted a couple of these tours in the last few weeks and had other discussions with teachers at other schools, something which has attracted the most attention is our low-variance curriculum model. These reactions have mostly been positive but some have seemed politely sceptical.

This is the first school I have worked in where this is whole-school policy. Primary departments in schools where I have been before have generally been quite good at sharing lessons and resources but in Secondary I would say that until recently (and even perhaps not) it is less common.

People more intelligent than I have written more insightfully about this topic but I wanted to write this to make the case for why it needs to be happening in LOTE (modern languages). Because I get the sense that it is not as widespread as it perhaps should be.

In this shorter post, I’m going to try and articulate why it is important.

Sharing is caring (for the students)

If you’d asked me about a low-variance curriculum earlier in my career, I probably would have viewed it with some suspicion. I would have probably said that it limits creativity, reduces autonomy and makes all classrooms feel “the same”.

There is probably some truth in all of those assertions. But I think those concerns also miss the point. The strongest argument for a low-variance curriculum is not about teachers. In the nicest possible way, if by “autonomy”, you mean “freedom to do whatever you want in the classroom”, then yes there’s going to be huge loss and you are going to have to deal with that.

I’m also going to say that this is about consistency whilst being conscious that the word consistency can have pejorative connotations. People have no doubt heard it used as a justification for overbearing performance management policies or practice.

So let me be clear, this is about the students. And it is about equity. Two students in different classes studying the same language deserve the same access to the same content, the same explanations and more or less the same experience. I believe that to do otherwise is unfair and you would be hard pressed to convince me otherwise now. In 2022, the Grattan Institute (an independent research organisation which makes public policy recommendations in Australia) called this scenario the “lesson lottery” and called for an end to this.

Sharing is fun (for teachers)

Brace yourself for an analogy. You might find it extreme but I think it underscores the message well.

Imagine two Year 9 French classes. Let’s call them 9A and 9B. Imagine it’s Thursday P1 and we are doing Reflexive verbs in the perfect tense (I wanted to use this because it’s one of the hardest things for students to master, I’d argue). 9A’s teacher uses a lesson which has been refined over several years and takes into account assessment data and common misconceptions. 9B’s teacher - pressed for time - downloads something from TES the night before or stays up until midnight making something from scratch. It should go without saying that, from a workload perspective, we don’t want any of those scenarios. It is also probably fair to say that 9B’s lesson probably wouldn’t be the best lesson for the students (it might, but probably not). On the other hand, a lesson that has been refined over time and is the result of the collective expertise of subject experts is likely to be the better option. At the risk of comparing 9B’s teacher to Doctor Nick from The Simpsons, we don’t want someone winging it. The stress of that is not fair for them and it is certainly not fair for our students.

Curriculum design and lesson planning are difficult. Really difficult. I only worked briefly with the former principal at my school but he has been credited - amongst others - for revolutionising the school’s approach to instruction. One of the mantras he espoused was “Incremental in time, radical over time”. Curriculum design requires us to think not only about what students need to know today, but also what they will need to know next month and next year. It requires careful sequencing, retrieval opportunities, assessment design and an understanding of how knowledge builds over time. It requires multiple iterations based on experiential and assessment data and - crucially - the critical expertise of multiple teachers. The contrasting idea that every teacher should independently do this work just seems strange when we stop and think about it. That is even before we consider the workload implications of this and the colossal duplication of task. In my experience, planning an effective 60-minute lesson can sometimes take 60 minutes. Imagine if you have six teachers all teaching the same year group and all spending 60 minutes to plan every 60-minute lesson.

Identical lessons is not the goal

A low-variance curriculum is not an attempt to make teachers identical. It is an attempt to ensure that students receive a consistently high-quality education regardless of whose classroom they happen to be put in. It is important to remember here that students don’t pick their teacher. We need to guard against students being unlucky to get one teacher but lucky to get another (e.g. “the lesson lottery”). In fact, I would argue that the less teachers have to worry about designing curriculum from scratch, the more attention they can devote to the things that matter most: explanation, questioning, feedback, relationships and responding to the students in front of them.

To borrow a phrase from Dylan Wiliam, teachers improve through a lifetime of disciplined inquiry. But inquiry is easier when we’re all working from the same map. If one teacher discovers a better explanation, a more effective retrieval task or a stronger example, that improvement can benefit every student rather than remaining confined to a single classroom. Indeed, the next stage of this - in the low variance model used at our school - is exactly this: we look at the data from an assessment taken by all classes and focus on questions where one class scored significantly higher than the others. We then ask that teacher to explain how they did it and then we add it to the lessons for next year. The only reason this is possible is because of the low-variance curriculum. If all your teachers are teaching different things, this is not possible. Without a low-variance curriculum, a common assessment would not be a valid tool because we cannot guarantee what was actually taught. The other way of looking at this is that it is about capturing individual expertise or the natural instructional moves that one of your teachers might make which have made the difference in how well their class retained the material. If what teachers are doing with their class when the door closes is that good, then we should all be doing it. An even simpler way to look at this is that it creates a space in which we discuss and reflect constantly on how to maximise instruction. For example, if you open a shared lesson that you plan to teach and realise that the explanation could do with some work or that there is a key step missing, you will share that thinking. You will most probably edit the slides to include what was missing. In some cases, this can create a dialogue about the best way to do this. All of that would be done in secret without a shared curriculum.

Sharing is powerful (for everyone)

Your reaction to this next bit is going to depend on what you perceive teaching to be. People inside and outside of education perceive the role of a teacher differently. To me, teaching is about optimising learning because the purpose of teaching is learning. Therefore, as teachers, our duty is to maximise the effectiveness and quality of our instruction in order to optimise learning.

As such, for me, the goal of a low-variance curriculum is to maximise the quality of instruction students are receiving so that they learn more. In the ways I’ve described above, a low-variance curriculum does this by:

• Ensuring that the best practice is captured. If it’s effective, everyone should be doing it.

• Ensuring that the materials put in front of the students are the best they can be. A low-variance curriculum does this through being the product of the collective expertise of several teachers. And - in the manner described above - being subject to incremental adjustments over time which are based on assessment data.

A low-variance curriculum isn't about making teachers less professional; it's about making professional knowledge more portable. Every improvement becomes everyone's improvement. Every refinement benefits every class. That seems to me to be a far better use of time, resources and collective expertise than six teachers independently solving the same problems.

Sharing actually is fun. But more importantly, it's one of the most powerful ways we can improve outcomes for our students