Anne Osborne | Foster Concepts
When a teaching team sits down to plan a unit of inquiry, how much of the meeting goes into working out what the subject standard means? I would like teachers to come to that meeting with a shared understanding of the learning they are responsible for. Then they can give their attention to the children in front of them. What do they already understand? What is worth investigating together? Where might their questions take us?
This is the curriculum design question I bring to schools through Foster Concepts. Have we made progression in subject learning clear enough in our curriculum for teachers to use it when they plan and teach? That work belongs across the school. If the link between one year’s expectations and the next exists mainly in an experienced teacher’s head, a colleague joining the team has to work it out all over again.
I remember trying to use the SOLO taxonomy to recognise when children were making connections between ideas (Biggs and Collis, 1982). It helped me think about the quality of an explanation. What I still needed from the curriculum was subject-specific guidance. Which ideas should children be connecting here, and what earlier learning could I build on?
What should the curriculum give teachers?
A school may be working with national or regional standards, its own agreed expectations, or a combination. The PYP subject continuums offer examples of subject learning that schools can adapt to their context. My concern here is how a school makes the development of subject knowledge, understanding and skills visible in the curriculum its teachers actually use. The IB’s Inquiry Learning Progressions serve a related purpose by describing how selected inquiry skills develop across subjects (IB, 2025, pp. 3–6).
A standard can identify an outcome and still leave a teacher wondering what understanding leads towards it. Heritage (2008, pp. 2–5) explains why knowing how learning develops within a subject matters for planning and formative assessment. For a school, I think that means reading expectations alongside one another. If the same topic appears in three units, can we explain what each encounter contributes?
How might a clear expectation shape an inquiry?
Take a brief example from mathematics. Imagine a school whose curriculum says “data handling” in two successive units. A teacher could plan a survey and a graph in both. Now suppose the school makes the development explicit. In the earlier unit, children use a graph to find how many responses fall into each category. In the later unit, they use comparisons between categories to justify a decision. These are illustrative school expectations.
A teacher planning the later unit might invite children to advise the librarian on which books to buy. The mathematical purpose is clear, and the children have decisions of their own to make. Whose reading preferences will they investigate? What will they ask? When a group makes a recommendation, the teacher can listen for the comparison that supports it. If children can read individual totals but find it hard to explain what the difference means for their decision, the teacher knows what to explore with them next.
What would I look for in a curriculum audit?
I would begin with one strand of subject learning. I would put the school’s adopted standards alongside the subject curriculum, two relevant unit plans and a few examples of learners’ work. With the teachers who use those documents, I would ask:
Can we trace what develops from one encounter to the next? Where have we repeated an expectation, or assumed knowledge that children have had little opportunity to build?
Can a teacher use that guidance to make a planning decision? Which subject understanding will this inquiry develop, and where is there room for learners to influence how they investigate it?
What does learners’ work tell us about the sequence we designed? Where might the curriculum need adjusting in light of what children actually understand?
Sometimes the most valuable change is a single sentence that makes the connection between two units clear. Elsewhere, an audit may uncover a gap that several teams need to address together. For me, the test is what happens at the next planning meeting. Can teachers see what learning they are building towards and use their time to design an inquiry that matters to their learners?
This article presents independent professional commentary and is not endorsed by the International Baccalaureate.
References
Biggs, J. B., and Collis, K. F. (1982). Evaluating the Quality of Learning: The SOLO Taxonomy (opens in a new tab). Academic Press.
Heritage, M. (2008). Learning Progressions: Supporting Instruction and Formative Assessment (opens in a new tab). Council of Chief State School Officers.
International Baccalaureate. (2025). PYP Curriculum Resources 2024–2025: Frequently Asked Questions (opens in a new tab). Programme Resource Centre (My IB access required).
A small AI confession: I have plenty of ideas. Writing them beautifully is another matter. AI helped me shape, organise and polish this piece, but the thinking, experience and opinions behind it are mine. I stand behind the ideas. AI just helped me persuade the sentences to cooperate.