Curriculum
Our Mastery and Expeditionary Curriculum at St Alban’s
At St Alban’s School, teaching is inspiring, innovative, creative, and develops a depth of knowledge and understanding which prepares children to be lifelong learners, mastering their skills across the curriculum. We teach subjects discretely and in a cross curricular way through our Adventures in Learning approach.
All mastery learning experiences follow an expeditionary approach and begin with an immersion week which engages the children. Then through a direct teaching model, using precise, well-structured teaching methods and varied and tailored quality resources, the children are taken on a learning journey which encourages them to develop knowledge and practice skills, and start to make links to help them remember. The teacher then skilfully questions, probes and scaffolds learning activities to deepen the understanding of children and allow them to reason and explore further through investigations, reasoning and creating, and applying their remembered knowledge and skills in a variety of ways and linking their learning across the curriculum to produce quality products at the end of their adventures in learning.
Throughout the learning process, outdoor, interactive, active and communicative lessons supported with the use of the Golden Ticket 3 ticks system, the adults, children and their peers are assessing their progress every step and children are acting on the feedback they receive, deepening their knowledge and understanding in every session. Every lesson follows our MASTER approach to teaching and learning:
M - Motivate the children with something exciting!
A - Show them its as easy as ABC/123!
S - Rehearse the Skills and check through self, peer or adult assessment at checkpoint 1.
T - Take their learning further and ensure they are fluent. Check through self, peer or adult assessment at checkpoint 2.
E - Take their learning Even deeper! Check through self, peer or adult assessment at checkpoint 3.
R - Reflect on their learning and share experiences of mastering their skills.
As a Catholic school, we consider all subjects as sacred which is outlined in the document below and in the aims of each subject policy. In line with our Mission Statement and Children's Promise, our termly guiding questions develop these themes over each year throughout school.
Autumn Term - Who am I and Where do I come from?
Advent deeper focus - How do people prepare for special celebrations?
Spring Term - How do people and the planet work together?
Lenten deeper focus - How do people prepare for a great change?
Summer Term - How can we love our world better?
To discover more about our exciting curriculum, please look at the documents and other pages below.