The themantic approach to curriculum is designed to provide the resources required to practically apply all the wonderful philosophies about teaching that we know in our guts we should be applying. It’s not just a framework - it’s a practical application.

Moreover, the themantic approach is not revolutionary - it’s evolutionary. It’s a simple amalgamation of many ideas and approaches all packaged in readily applied resources.

Every themantically-designed textbook is written lesson-by-lesson, with the order of information provided to students carefully selected. Many textbooks simply mirror the curriculum layout as put forward by the examining bodies. This makes sense for reference, but does not make sense from a learner’s perspective. The texts are written from a top-down approach, but learning happens from the bottom-up.

We learn through making connections between existing knowledge and new information in response to a question or problem - so every themantic lesson introduces a manageable amount of new information that builds on learning from previous lessons. Each lesson also has a guiding question that is designed as the question or problem that students must process information in relation to. In order to be able to answer the question, they must understand the relationship between important pieces of information.