“The main purpose of curriculum is to build up the content of long-term memory so that when students are asked to think, they are able to think in more powerful ways because what is in their long-term memories makes their short-term memories more powerful.” (Wiliam, 2018)
As a Kite Academy school, we have identified eight disciplinary concepts that underpin our curriculum. By identifying a main concept (or concepts) for each subject in a unit of learning, we are able to develop this curriculum coherence or ‘stickability’ of knowledge, enabling it to be committed to longer term memory. We use these concepts to shape the key knowledge in a subject, linking across subjects too (‘interdisciplinary’). This process can be summarised in the following diagram. Throughout our planning, the disciplinary concepts are colour coded for quick reference.
