How to refresh your curriculum using Oak resources

- Hello, everyone. Welcome to this video on how to refresh your curriculum using Oak resources. My name is Chris Fountain, the English subject lead here at Oak. I'm gonna walk you through four steps to help you easily refresh your lesson content without having to start from scratch by using Oak resources as a foundation to build from. So let's get started. Step one, identify areas that need refreshing. Start by looking through your existing curriculum and auditing it. What's not working anymore? Are there units your team are tired of teaching? What needs a new lease of life? Similarly, look for any units that are no longer relevant. Is there a text in English, case study in geography, or time period in history that no longer feels relevant to the rest of your curriculum? You might also want to come at this from the opposite angle. What is missing from your curriculum? What do you want to add to it? What topics could you integrate to add more diversity and breadth? Once you know what needs to be refreshed, replaced, or added, you can get to work. Step two, find Oak units that match your needs. Start by using the lesson search function in our teacher area to browse through our curriculum maps and download the one that is applicable to your subject key stage. Read the list of core content for each lesson in a unit to help you decide whether it is the right one to integrate into your curriculum. It's also worth looking at the unit and lesson overview pages of the teacher area to see if there is more information available about particular lessons. It can help support your planning and decision making. Step three, connect Oak units into your curriculum. Now that you've chosen the new unit to integrate into your curriculum, find relevant connected units that you already teach. For instance, if you are introducing a new Shakespeare unit, find the other Shakespeare units in your curriculum. Then look at what you teach about that topic. You need to make sure that the knowledge students have already learned is consistent with the Oak unit. Similarly, look at definitions. Check you define key terms in the same way. If there are any inconsistencies, what is the most appropriate edit to make? You also need to check if content progresses logically between your existing units and the Oak unit. Let's say you choose to integrate a year five Oak unit. Is it more challenging than your related year four unit? Is it less challenging than your related year six unit? If not, what changes do you need to make to the Oak unit? What content needs to be added or removed? What needs to be tweaked? Step four, adapt the unit to meet the needs of your pupils and school. Remember, the Oak unit was not designed for your specific pupils. Consider what changes need to be made to ensure the unit best supports your pupils and their needs. In some cases, this might include adding scaffolding to challenging tasks or splitting tricky lessons into two smaller lessons to support cognitive load. All of this is going to depend on the context of your pupils in school, so do what will best support their learning. Likewise, you might need to add more challenge to the unit. Are there stretch tasks you could add to some of the lessons or even additional lessons you could build into the unit? Think carefully about how you can adapt the Oak unit to make it work best for your pupils, school, and wider curriculum aims. And remember, the Oak unit will work most successfully in your school if you use it as a foundation to build from. So now we've talked through those four steps, I hope you're able to find inspiration from Oak and refresh your units with ease without having to start from scratch. Good luck and enjoy. And if you need any extra support, download our quick guide. It includes all of the steps that I've talked through, as well as prompt questions for each to help kickstart your planning. Enjoy!