Five ways to enrich your school's curriculum

At Schools Now! earlier this year, the conference theme was ‘Enriching your Curriculum’. Leaders from all over the world gathered to discuss the importance of an engaging and inclusive curriculum.

For keynote speaker Victoria Pendry, an enriched curriculum shouldn’t just be an optional extra. When students feel connected to what they’re learning, they walk away from lessons feeling more empowered and purposeful. Watch the short video below to understand Pendry's three key recommendations.

So, how can schools make their curriculum meaningful for students in support of meeting international standards? Let’s explore five strategies that you can apply, from ideas that classroom teachers can implement, to tips for syllabus design.

What is an enriched curriculum?

The word ‘curriculum’ means different things to different people. Perhaps it’s the textbook you use to plan your lessons. Or it could be the requirements set by the Department for Education in your country.

An enriched curriculum might involve any of these systems. However, it strives to make the content relevant to learners. They should be able to see themselves, their culture, and their heritage in the lessons they’re taught.

In the context of English language education, you might still prepare for international tests or base your lessons on a British curriculum. However, an enriched curriculum will enable you to teach the material in a way that your learners can relate to and feel inspired by.

How educators can enrich their school curriculum

So, what does enriching your curriculum look like in practice? Here are some actionable ideas for schools: 

1. Encourage cultural expression

Let children communicate in ways that are familiar and meaningful to them. You can achieve this by incorporating local practices and cultural traditions into the curriculum.

Meeting children at their level is especially important for young learners' cognitive development. They’re still building a schema of the world around them. Familiar communication styles, including the use of images and sounds, can help them make connections between new information and the world around them. 

What’s more, young learners are more likely to do well at tasks and build confidence if they’re familiar with the format of those activities. Building learning routines and habits into lessons helps learners to feel safe and motivated to explore something new.

What do we mean by incorporating local practices and norms? Say you’re using an international textbook that requires students to give individual show-and-tell presentations whereas, in your local culture, children rarely stand up in front of the class alone. You can replace this task with a culturally familiar task. Perhaps students are more used to clustering around for story time. Try having everyone form a loose circle and explain why their item is important instead.

2. Make project work relevant

Design tasks that are directly related to your learners’ lives and experiences. Better yet, get them to solve problems that they’re likely to encounter, rather than far-off examples that aren’t relevant to their immediate environment. 

One classic example is how international textbooks may focus on temperate weather systems. Not every country experiences the four seasons, and students might find weather-related topics unengaging. Meanwhile, teachers may find it impossible to assign tasks like collecting fallen leaves or identifying spring flowers.

However, this is a chance to redesign these projects and relate them to your own country’s climate. You could have learners observe changes in the weather over a few weeks or months. If you live in a tropical area, you could ask them to collect rainwater in bottles to measure the level. When students are applying learning to the world around them, they are more likely to be motivated and engaged.

3. Focus on local issues

Secondary school students are the most likely to be aware of international events. However, they can still benefit from connecting topics to their own lived experiences, as it helps them to become more aware of how global issues affect them personally. By engaging with issues on different levels, they can understand their role in the local community and the broader world. 

Explore topics in the curriculum from your learners’ perspective. For example, if you cover environmental issues, you can tailor the discussion to talk about their direct experiences with pollution. Then you could move on to talk about how these local challenges relate to global issues like climate change and severe weather phenomena.

4. Weave in community narratives

Most educational programmes involve storytelling. School leaders can complement or replace many of the ones in the international curriculum with local narratives. 

These could take the form of anecdotes, historical accounts, oral histories and cultural traditions from your community. For example, secondary textbooks often have reading exercises about famous European figures like Shakespeare, Einstein and Leonardo DaVinci. So, which figures are the equivalent in your community? Incorporate their narratives into your lessons and see how your students respond to this kind of representation. 

5. Use local resources

Find ways to include tools and resources from the local community in your curriculum. There are many ways to do this but here are a few for inspiration:

• Invite local experts to give talks
• Visit nearby businesses and cultural centres for field trips
• Use authentic materials from your surroundings
• Include examples of art, music, and drama from your country
• Discuss national research and findings
• Collaborate with local organisations to arrange events

When you combine the curriculum resources with those from the community, you can create a more dynamic and immersive environment. Representation matters - and it’s important for learners to see their community, values and traditions reflected in their school curriculum. 

Final thoughts

The secret to an enriched curriculum isn’t just localising your classes. After all, many learners are excited to engage in global trends and learn more about the world outside their own communities. Instead, educators must discover what’s meaningful to students and incorporate it into their syllabus.

Often, that means exploring how the international curriculum relates to your learners’ lives and their local community. That way, your students can see where they belong in a globalised world, feel grounded and connected to their local culture, and empowered to take the next steps in their education.

Access more curriculum-enriching resources from the Online Support for Schools (OSS) or, if not already a Partner School educator, contact us to find out more about becoming one.