Teacher guidance
This page guides you through the six key steps of getting started with Maestro. You may wish to bookmark this page to reference later.
Tip: To be able to start planning properly and using the features mentioned below, you will need to ensure that you are assigned to a class and that your class is assigned to a class plan. If not, please speak to your SLT to organise this for you.Step 1: Staff Introduction
This step involves staff working together to discuss the different aspects raised in Step 4 of the Getting started - SLT guide in order to establish a whole school approach to the introduction of Maestro, its pedagogy and how the school is to implement this while making it bespoke to their setting and context.
Once this has been established, you’re ready to start planning.
Remember, we do offer free online training and support, so please do not hesitate to get in touch if you would like to arrange this.
Step 2: Creating groups
Your classes will have been set up and checked by your Maestro administrator, and are usually brought through from your Management Information System (eg SIMS). Before you start planning and teaching your class in the new academic year, you might like to set up some learning groups within your class. These may help later in making tracking skills and coverage quicker and more accurate.
The article below will help you create your learning groups.
Step 3: Choosing projects
You can now start to design your curriculum. All schools will approach this differently in order to create a completely bespoke curriculum that reflects the needs of their context and aims. Many schools choose to use our Cornerstones Curriculum model which ensures sequencing and progression.
Please read through the articles in the Cornerstones Curriculum section of this Help Center for guidance, if this is the curriculum model that your school is using, particularly the How to plan using the Cornerstones Curriculum article.
However, if your school chooses to build their own curriculum, you may be asked to choose projects to be included in the school curriculum. These will then be checked (usually by SLT or a colleague with curriculum responsibility) to see how much coverage they provide relating to the national curriculum programme of study, and also to check the progression of knowledge and skills through the choice of projects across the whole school. In some cases, if your chosen projects provide too much duplication in some areas, leaving gaps in others, you may need to look at swapping them.
The articles below will give you more information about types of projects, including how to create your own:
Step 4: Class plans
Once your curriculum has been designed, the projects will be allocated to each class, so teachers associated with those classes will be able to see those projects in Plan and assess > My projects.
In addition, if you click on Plan and assess > Class plan details, you will be able to view a fully editable medium-term plan showing the projects in the planned order of teaching. You can modify this plan to create your own bespoke document, which can be printed out and shared.
This article will give you further information on using your class plans:
Step 5: Planning and teaching
There are a number of ways to map out your lessons and plan them in further detail, including adapting the lessons provided or creating your own bespoke lessons. The following articles describe the different aspects of this in more detail:
You may also find the following article helpful:
Step 6: Tracking and assessing
Maestro not only helps plan your curriculum coverage but will also enable you to track your lessons as you go through the year, to ensure that your actual coverage of the curriculum reflects the intended coverage. The data this gathers can also be used to inform assessment and help schools track pupil progress over a longer period of time. The following articles will give you further information about these different aspects:
You can also track lessons directly through the projects if you are not using the timetable for your planning or if you are teaching a lesson from a project not in your curriculum plan (you may be supplementing a subject or aspect by utilising occasional lessons from other projects).
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