Sequencing knowledge within a science curriculum

Adam Stubbs, Teacher of Science and Maths; Evidence Leader in Education, Park View School, UK Designing a curriculum forces decisions to be made about the importance and value of different ideas while structuring their progression over time. As subject experts, teachers are well placed to plan, structure and sequence the curriculum. However, the subject expertise necessary to design a curriculum can cause teachers to succumb to the curse of knowledge, whereby their thought processes are biased by virtue of their expertise. The way in which a teacher conceptualises, sequences and processes knowledge differs from that of a novice learner, which influences how they identify, conceptualise and sequence ideas (Birch et al., 2017). This causes teachers to recognise patterns and ideas to which students are unable because they don’t have such a well-developed schema. As teachers conceptualise subjects differently to students, their innate ideas about sequencing topics are likely to be bia