Session 5 Activity - Refelction on Djanogly Academy's curriculum innovation

Djanogly City Academy provides education for various students in various ages, ranging from 3 to 19.  The Academy's specialism is information and communication technology (ICT). Unlike the traditional school, they offer a wide range of subjects, covering arts, sciences and life skills. Besides, they also aware how important are the core subjects, such as English, Maths and Science.

By looking at their curricula closely, I found out that they sparate the students into 3 key stages. Therefore, they created 3 different curriculum as aiming to various stages. The first stage is focusing on students from 11 years old to 14 years old. In this stage, they emphasise on traditional, tried, tested and successful approaches to learning with an emphasis on literacy (reading, writing and speaking) and mathematics. The second stage is for year 10 and year 11 students. In these two years, school adds some interesting subjects to the curriculum. They are Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Art, Textiles, Business Studies, Child Care, Dance, French, Spanish, German, Food Technology, Design Technology, Information Technology, Geography, History, Hairdressing, Media, Motor Vehicle, PE and Sport, Psychology, Sociology. Finally, as it comes to the third stage, students can choose a wide variety of academic and vocational subjects.

After synthetize and linking all the information in Djanogly Academy to what we learnt in the class, I personally think that they are doing sustaining curriculum innovation as for the following reasons. Although they try to engage students with a more interesting and wide range by providing some untraditional courses in the second stage (arts, hairdressing, ect.,) , they are still using the conventional classes to teach which will make no major differences. On top of this, like the traditional schools, they care about the test results as I can see there is a exam success bottom under the curriculum category.

Nevertheless, one thing I like about this innovative curriculum is that they offered students a platform to demonstate their innovative works on the internet, which will be advantageous to students development.

Here is the link to aceess the students' work of Djanogly Academy:
http://www.djanogly.notts.sch.uk/curriculum/student-showcase/Pages/default.aspx