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Dear Reader,

Writing this on a Saturday might not be ideal, but it wouldn't be so bad if looking outside my window didn't resemble this:

Am I being dramatic? Perhaps, though it is foggier than one would wish (and I appreciate that speaking about myself in the third person like a Bridgerton character is probably not helping my non-dramatic image). But the silver lining is that at least I get to write to you, dear teacher, and that is always a pleasure despite it being on a weekend¹.

The reason I'm working on a weekend is that the thresholds for the oral exam have been published by most regions this week, so I've been working extra hard on the new preparation programme.

Wait, hold on: did I just announce the new preparation programme without meaning to? I did, apparently, so: 📣 the new preparation programme is ready for you to jump aboard!

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New preparation programme: key info

(scroll down if not interested - no offense taken, mostly because I'll never know)

In short, if you want to pass the oral exam, you need to be ready essentially for 2 things (plus an extra third one):

1. The lesson plan
2. The domande disciplinari
3. Bonus: a good level of spoken English, around C1

So to help you with all of that, I have designed:

• ​a new lesson planning course, updated for 2026 with, among other things: talking you through how to do your lesson plan in 10-15 minutes (what to skip, what to keep, how long to spend on each thing, etc); civic education and ESP (microlingua) topics; laws in English, with the right terminology and where to put them. Pre-order it now with a 10-euro discount on lifetime access.
• ​a domande disciplinari preparation bundle, with the 3 courses you need to focus on *all* the materie disciplinari: literature, history, culture, teaching methods, English as a lingua franca, assessment and so on.
• a schedule of live exam coaching - individual and in small groups, in English: listening carefully to your needs has been enlightening. I understood that some of you need individual lessons, so you'll get individual lessons. I understood that you need practical strategies, so you'll get practical strategies, including: phrases to present your lesson plan, how to structure your answers, how to answer when you don't know the answer, how to pick up again when you get interrupted by the committee (rude, but frequent). You will again get to work with me and the brilliant André and Emma. The calendar is ready and will run all February and March, with discounts for multiple lessons (applied automatically to your basket thanks to this lifesaving new booking platform I've been working with). Enrollments on these open soon, but...

If you're interested, download the exam guide and programme guide I've put together for you:

Download the guide

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Now, one of the guiding lights of the work I've been doing on this particular oral exam is that I have realised there are a lot of unspoken and unwritten things you need to know to pass it (well).

And this has brought me back to what I think is a pivotal concept in education: the hidden curriculum. This is a really insightful lens through which we can look at our work as teachers, and also as "students" for the concorso - a role in which we are cast despite our will, but alas. So today, I will tell you:

• a story that revealed the hidden curriculum to me
• what the hidden curriculum is and examples
• 5 ways in which I have tried to made the hidden curriculum less hidden in the new preparation programme

Ready or not (but please take a moment to get ready with a cup of coffee), here we go 🚀

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A story: what we teach vs. what students think we're teaching

A few years ago, I had the privilege of interviewing secondary school teachers and their students about some lessons I had observed. I'm very deeply into listening, slightly alarmingly so, which means I dissected every single part of the lesson carefully.

One thing jumped out at me: the discrepancy in the teacher's and the students' views of the very. same. lesson. Not only did they sometimes recall different details (e.g. what had been done, how long for, etc) but they also had very different ideas of the why.

Indeed, I was speaking to a student - we'll call him Elio, a pseudonym not at all inspired by the Disney movie I saw last weekend - about a lesson in which they had done a listening activity with some comprehension questions. He was absolutely adamant that the purpose of the activity was to learn some new vocabulary from the unit and that that vocabulary would go in the next test. When I spoke to the teacher, however, none of this was in her plans.

Maybe this has happened to you, too? You did something in the classroom, perhaps without overtly specifying its purpose, and your learners interpreted its purpose in their own way, but you only found out later... or never: such is the nature of the "hidden" curriculum.

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Uncovering the hidden curriculum

A term coined in the 1960s, the hidden curriculum refers to

In other words, it's all those unspoken rules and values that somehow get conveyed to the students, and that if mastered, help students get better results. The problem is... they're not written anywhere, so mastering them can only happen if students first realise that they exist.

The hidden curriculum can include unspoken social norms, such as raising your hand to speak, or values that teachers or schools convey. For example, in many Italian contexts, speaking "well" (i.e. in an articulated manner) is often regarded as important, so much so that articulate students can sometimes get by even if they don't know as much about the content.

But we can also convey a hidden curriculum in the way that we teach: for example, if we regularly put the vocabulary from listening activities in vocabulary tests, our learners might learn that they are expected to memorise this vocabulary. This is not in itself a bad thing, but a) we haven't told them explicitly, so only some of them will pick up on it and b) those who do pick up on it might end up over-focusing on the new vocabulary when they do a listening, at the expense of other purposes like listening for gist, critical thinking or whatever else we meant as the purpose of the activity. In this sense, they have their own hidden curriculum.

The hidden curriculum is also particularly relevant for the oral exam of the concorso. Like all subjective assessment, the oral exam is naturally prone to human judgment, resulting in less standardisation. However, a syllabus and some assessment rubrics do exist, so you might be forgiven if you thought those were enough for a teacher to know what is expected and required.

But as much as I wish this were true, and I did once naively thought it might be, it isn't. Yes, passing the oral exam does include being aware of and studying those topics to comply with those 3 requirements: lesson planning, knowledge of the materie disciplinari, C1 English.² However, it doesn't end there: you need to know about the hidden expectations to ace that exam. The good news is: I can help you with that.

Here are 5 examples of unwritten expectations that you need to know to pass the exam and how I've used them in the new preparation programme.

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1. What you need to design

The terminological confusion that has come from the official documents related to the oral exam will never fail to amaze me. Committees have interpreted documents in their own ways and produced all sorts of terminology for what you need to design. Examples I've seen first hand include: learning activity, learning path (?), lesson, learning unit (?), attività didattica. Which has left many of you dumbfounded, depriving you of precious time since you only have 24 hours to do your lesson plan.

👉 How I've put this knowledge to good use: While each committee will do whatever they like³, most will expect you to plan 2 or 3 lessons on the topic they've given you. In the new lesson planning course, I walk you through how to do this.

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2. How long you have for your lesson plan

In the official documents: 22.5 minutes. In reality: most committees will stop you at the 10 or 15 minute mark. Some will even specify this requirement in the traccia (which I find kinder).

👉 How I've put this knowledge to good use: In the lesson planning course, I will explain to you which sections of the lesson plan you need to include, how many details and how many slides to dedicate to them, and what to prioritise when you present it so that you can stick to the 10/15 minute expectation. In the live coaching sessions, we will practise how to speak concisely and how to deal with the timing and interruptions.

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3. The laws

Do the official documents officially state that you will officially get questions about laws and key documents? Debateable. But regardless of that, plenty of teachers have reported that this was the case in the last round of oral exams.

👉 How I've put this knowledge to good use: In the lesson planning course, I've created a whole unit on the laws you need to cite in English, with the correct terminology so it's quick and hopefully a bit less painful to learn. In the live coaching sessions, I will deliver a dedicated session to practising talking about these laws in English.

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4. The value of "speaking well"

As if it wasn't enough that elocution is highly regarded in Italy, the exam also tests your spoken English skills. It may technically be the criterion with the lower amount of points in the quadri di riferimento, but it is high on many committees' list of priorities.

👉 How I've put this knowledge to good use: you will have access to a whole programme of live coaching lessons, where we will learn lots of useful phrases to improve your English for speaking at the exam (and save you when your mind goes blank).

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5. The topics

Given the vastness of the concorso syllabus, it is notoriously difficult to predict what topics you'll get for your lesson plan and for your domande disciplinari. However, the trends for the last couple of years have been quite clear: while many of your usual suspects have come up for the lesson plans (grammar, skills, functions, literature), there have also been plenty of tracce about ESP (microlingua) and what we might call civic education topics. The same goes for the domande disciplinari: lots of literature and history, some culture, something about teaching and assessment, including proficiency exams. One thing to note: some tracce and domande disciplinari have tackled extremely niche topics, particularly to do with the literature. It's possible that some committees choose these only to make things unnecessarily harder, but I like to think (and it's a less depressing way to see it) that their purpose is to test your coping strategies³.

👉 How I've put this knowledge to good use: you'll find a great multitude of topics to study in the domande disciplinari courses, so you can quickly revise lots of content. This increases your statistical probability of getting a topic you know about. The courses also include some niche topics, such as contemporary authors, American and Irish authors, and Black authors. I have also added content about civic education and ESP to the course on lesson planning so you can get a sense of how to structure these lessons.

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And that concludes today's newsletter! What is your hidden curriculum? Did you learn one as a student?

While you mull that one over, let me wish you a wonderful Sunday with your loved ones. Remember to download the programme guide if you want to find out how we can help you pass the exam.

Take care, dear teacher ✨

¹ Although, if you also sometimes (or always) work on weekends/evenings/outside of standard business hours, you may be wondering if you're in good company: yes, you are. Apparently, 40% of teachers in England work in the evenings and 10% work during weekends. According to the TALIS 2018, "on average across the OECD, teachers spend 38.8 hours per week on all the tasks related to their job in their surveyed school, of which 20.6 hours are devoted to teaching". That means that over half the time is spent on non-teaching duties, including preparation and the dreaded bureaucracy.

² The website of the Ministry has been down all week so I can't link to the quadri di riferimento but I wrote a guide about them that you might find useful on the LanguagEd blog (which is not down).

³ Eons ago, i.e. when I was at uni, I did a legal interpreting exam, where I had to translate from Italian to English. The context was that of a murder trial and the murder weapon was an "attizzatoio da camino". I cursed that lecturer for years, until I became a teacher myself and realised that no doubt they were just testing my strategies to cope with something I was statistically very unlikely to know.

P.S.: My weekly suggestion for things to listen to/watch/read to improve your English while relaxing: My current read: How to age disgracefully, by Clare Pooley. It's light, funny and very British. Perfect for this slightly sluggish start of January.

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