Our Curriculum Intent
In order for our students to be best-prepared and successful for their futures, in an ever-changing World, we need to provide something different.
Through conversations and research alongside employers, colleges and universities, it apparent that the majority of school leavers are missing key skills, outlined here:
However, this is hardly surprising when we consider the current education model and how little time is given to children to practise and develop these skills.
At LAB, we must provide a curriculum that empowers our children to regularly practise and develop these skills through authentic, real-life situations.
1. It all begins with POWERFUL knowledge.
Children must know something in order to apply it.
To communicate, problem solve, be creative or think critically, we must be confident in the knowledge that we are using.
Therefore, we must plan and design a curriculum which contains the most valuable, powerful and essential knowledge at the heart. We must value this knowledge and ensure that we know it and remember it.
If we want to develop confident, articulate speakers, we must ensure our children are secure and fluent in the knowledge we expect them to confidently articulate.
If we want to develop problem solvers, we must ensure that our children have the knowledge and skill they need in order to solve the problems they face.
2. The application of knowledge to real-life, authentic situations: Developing POWER skills.
Too often, learning stops at knowledge fluency and children rarely have the opportunity to develop the above missing skills: Once a child has become fluent in their knowledge retention and is able to answer low complexity questions correctly, they often move on to the next knowledge.
This is where we want to be different at LAB.
Once knowledge has been mastered, we want our learners to use and apply that knowledge in real-life, authentic situations that will develop their POWER SKILLS. For example, students may:
- Collaborate, learning to work successfully in project teams, to combine their knowledge to find a solution to a given problem or scenario;
- Be given time to organise and present their understanding to an interview panel with question and answers at the end, testing their ability to use their knowledge on the spot;
- Be tasked to create a website, video documentary or video game, linking to their learning in computing, to explain and use their understanding;
- Be asked to design and create a product which could solve a given problem.
3. Building digital creativity.
We all know that our children of today are highly able to use and consume technology.
However, we do not simply want our learners to be digital consumers. We want them to become DIGITAL CREATORS.
We are invested in and have the resources and facilities available to us, to enrich our learners with the computational knowledge and skill they need to think critically and creatively with technology.
Linking to the development of POWER SKILLS, we ensure that our curriculum is filled with engaging opportunities for our learners to apply their understanding through the creative use of technology.
