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Scholar's Guide
We have introduced Scholar’s Guides for the Summer term 24 to further support our Oakbank vision by enabling staff, students and parents to be extremely clear on the core knowledge and skills that are being delivered to students. Our Scholar’s Guide parent video shows the ways in which students can use the information provided within them at home to self quiz and support their learning.
At Oakbank the intent of our curriculum is very clear; we are an ambitious school in which students are provided with exceptional opportunities that equip them with the skills, knowledge, and personal attributes to thrive in school, and beyond. In order to achieve this we have developed challenging, knowledge intensive curriculums and our Scholar’s Guides are our way of communicating this. They are a tool to complement the work done in classrooms every day.
A FOCUS ON KNOWLEDGE
The only difference between a subject expert and a novice is how much knowledge they have about that topic and how well that knowledge is organised in their memory. When knowledge is well structured, it becomes meaningful and can be used to solve complex and interesting problems. Our subject teams have selected the most relevant and important knowledge to be taught across Years 7 – 9 in order to prepare our students to thrive in the world, as well as supporting students to make informed choices about their GCSE study.
COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND MEMORY
We know from current research that our working memory is very limited (it can only store between 4-7 pieces of new information in one go) this has huge implications for how we plan and teach our curriculum. We also know that our long term memory, where all of the things we have learnt are stored, has an unlimited capacity. This is why subject leaders have developed their curriculum to ensure that lessons and learning builds on previous knowledge and therefore takes on deeper meaning and understanding as time goes by.
BUILDING SCHEMA
If we want students to remember the information that they learn, they need to be able to connect it to other information in their long term memory. When this happens an interconnected network of knowledge forms called a Schema. Students need to connect current learning with what they have learnt previously and relate new information to old information to prevent it from disappearing from their memories. Teachers will explicitly make links between the information they teach, and help students to build a detailed, easily recalled web of knowledge in student’s long term memory.
Click below to access Scholar’s Guides for Cycle 3 which is the Summer term 24.
Oakbank-Scholars-Guide-Yr8-C3-Summer-03.24-v2-52pp.pdfOakbank-Scholars-Guide-Yr9-C3-Summer-03.24-v2-48pp.pdfOakbank-Scholars-Guide-Yr10-C3-Summer-03.24-v2-40pp-002.pdf
