Getting started - Teacher guidance

Getting started - 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.

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 Cwricwlwm Maestro, its pedagogy and how the school is to implement this while making it bespoke to their setting and context.
  1. Getting started - SLT guide: Step 4: Introduction to staff
Once this has been established, you’re ready to start planning.

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/Arbor/Integris). 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.
  1. Creating Learning Groups

Step 3: Choosing projects

Your curriculum can now be constructed using the Cwricwlwm designer. All schools will approach this differently in order to create a completely bespoke curriculum that reflects the needs of their context and aims. 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 WMS from the Curriculum for Wales, and also to see what progression is built in 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.
 
See these pages for further information on choosing projects:
  1. Choosing and adding projects to your curriculum
  2. Planning using ILPs and KRPs
 
The articles below will give you more information about types of project, including how to create your own: 
  1. Types of project
  2. School projects

Step 4: Class plans

Once your curriculum has been designed, the projects can then 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 plans > 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:
  1. 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:
  1. Project content and resources
  2. Planning using the timetable
  3. Planning using My lessons
  4. Planning through the projects
 
You may also find the following articles helpful:
  1. Planning using ILPs and KRPs
  2. Planning using Early Years projects

Step 6 : Tracking and assessing

Cwricwlwm 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:
  1. Lesson information and recording attainments
  2. Actual coverage
  3. Track pupil progress

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 an AoLE by utilising occasional lessons from other projects). The following sections may be helpful:
  1. Recording attainments through project


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