In January, after one term of us using knowledge organisers, I posted this blog about how our experiment with them was going. 6 months later, the academic year over, I thought it might be useful to share my reflections upon what we’ve learnt along the way.  Since January, the importance of schools taking a good, long look at the curriculum they offer has really come to the fore, thanks to those trend setters down at Ofsted Towers. Amanda Spielman’s talk at the Festival of Education underlined what Sean Harford has been talking (and tweeting) about all year – stop obsessing about data (sort of) and the inevitable narrow focus on English and maths that necessitates[1], the curriculum is where it is at these days guys. So there is a lot of waking up and smelling the coffee going on as we begin to realise just how iconoclastic this message really is.  The ramifications are huge and startling. It’s a bit like the emperor with no clothes suddenly berates us for our poor fashion sense. We feel indignant (the data nonsense was Ofsted driven after all), pleased (we always wanted a broader curriculum), terrified (are asking to have their cake and eat it – schools side-lined the rest of the curriculum for a reason and not on a whim – how possible is it to really go for quality in the other subjects when getting good sats /gcse results is still such a monumental struggle?) and woefully ill-prepared.

I’m going to focus on the ‘pleased’ bit. It’s not that I don’t share the indignation and the terror. The indignation we will just have to get over. A broader curriculum will only happen if Ofsted want a broader curriculum – such is the power they wield – so let’s try and move on from the exasperation we feel when the curriculum poachers turn curriculum gamekeepers. As for the terror, let’s keep on letting Amanda and Sean know why we are so scared. I wrote another blog a while back about the triple constraint – the idea (from engineering project management) that the three variables of time, cost and scope (a term which embraces both quality and performance specification) are constrained by one another.  If you wish to increase the scope of a project by wanting quality in a broader range of areas than previously, then that will inevitably either cost you more time or more money. Time in education is relatively inelastic.  We can’t just deliver the ‘project’ later.  We can’t say we will get high standards across all areas of the curriculum by doing our GCSE’s when the ‘children’ are 20 (though this school did try something along those lines. It didn’t end well.)  So that leaves spending more on our project as the only other option. Mmmm, few problems with that.

But I digress. Back to being pleased. I am really pleased. After all, we started on revamping our ‘afternoon’ subjects well before Ofsted started banging on about this. We did so not because of Ofsted but because a) developments from cognitive science make a very strong case for ensuring children are explicitly taught knowledge if they are to become critical thinkers and creative problem solvers and b) children are entitled to a knowledge-rich curriculum.  I have become convinced of the moral duty to provide our children with a curriculum that ensures that they get their fair share of the rich cultural inheritance our nation and our world affords, an inheritance hitherto seen as the birth right of the rich and not the poor.

By sharing our experience so far, I hope I can save other schools some time (that precious commodity) by helping them avoid making the mistakes we did when we rolled out knowledge organisers and multiple choice quizzes last September.

A quick recap about what we did. We focused on what I am going to call ‘the big four’ i.e. the 4 ‘foundation’[2] subjects: history, geography, RE and science.  In July 2016 I shared some knowledge organisers from other schools with the staff – almost all from secondary schools as I could only find one example from a primary school at that point. Staff then attempted to write their own for these 4 subjects for the coming academic year.  It seemed to me at the time that this would be a relatively straight forward thing to do. I was wrong but more of that later. Our afternoon curriculum had been timetables into 3 week blocks, with strict cut offs one the 3 weeks had elapsed. This worked extremely well. It tightened planning – much less faff – much more deciding up front what really mattered, hitting the ground running with specific coverage in mind. It gave an excitement to the learning. Neither the children nor the teacher got bored by a topic that drifted on and on, just because that half term was quite long. It also meant that subjects did not fall off the edge of the school year never taught because people had run out of time. I would highly recommend this way of structuring the delivery of most of the foundation subjects. Obviously it doesn’t work for PE (though a good case can be made for doing it in swimming), MFL or PHSE, which need to be done at least weekly, but that still leaves at least 3 afternoons for the other stuff.

The weekend before each block started, the children took home the knowledge organiser for the new block.  The idea being that they read the KO, with their parents help where necessary. Then on Monday, the teacher started to teach them the content, some of which some of them would have already read about at the weekend. The next weekend, the KO’s went home again, along with a multiple choice quiz based on it, the answers to which were all (in theory) in the KO. These didn’t have to be given in and the scores were not recorded, although in some classes children stuck the KO and each quiz in a homework book.  The same procedure was repeated on the second weekend of the block. Then on the final Friday of each block, a multiple choice quiz was done and marked in class. The teacher took notice of the scores but we didn’t track them on anything. This is something we are changing this September with a very simple excel spreadsheet to record just the final end of unit quiz score.

Since we didn’t have KO’s for computing, art or DT, I suggested that during these curriculum blocks, children should take home the KO from a previous block and revise that and then do a quiz on it at the end of the art (or whatever) block. The ideas being that by retrieving the knowledge at some distance from when it was originally taught, the testing effect would result in better long term recall.  However, as it was a suggestion and I didn’t really explain about the testing effect and teachers are busy and the curriculum over full, it just didn’t happen. From this September, I’ve explicitly specified what needs to be revisited when in our curriculum map. Towards the end of last year, I also gave over some staff meeting and SMT time to studying cognitive psychology and this will continue next term with the revamp of our teaching and learning policy which is being rewritten with the best insights from cognitive science explicitly in mind.

Then, in the dying days of term, in mid July, the children took an end of year quiz in each of the 4 subjects which mixed up questions from all the topics they had studied that year. In the two weeks prior to this, children had revised from a mega KO, in effect a compilation of all previous KO’s and quizzes that year. They had revised this in lessons (particularly helpful at the end of term when normal service in interrupted by special events, hand over meetings and so forth) and at the weekend for homework. It hadn’t really been my intention to do this at the start of the year, but I confess to being a bit spooked by Ofsted reports that had (the lack of) assessment in the foundation subjects down as a key issue, something I wrote about here.  But having done so, I think it is a good idea. For one, it gives the children another chance to revisit stuff they’ve learnt several months previously, so improving the likelihood that they will be able to recall this information in the longer term.  Secondly, it gives these subjects status. We did the tests after our reports were written and parents meetings held. Next year I want to get the end of year scores (just a simple mark out of 10 or 15) on reports and shared with parents.  The results from the end of year tests were interesting. In the main, almost all children did very well. Here are the results, expressed as average class percentages. I’m not going to tell you which year group is which as my teachers might rightly feel a bit perturbed about this, so I’ve mixed up the order here, but it represents year groups 2-6.

History	RE	Science	Geography
86%	93%	85%	84%
79%	85%	91%	82%
83%	95%	87%	n/a
75%	75%	67%	74%
70%	76%	66%	n/a

One class was still studying their geography block when we took the tests and another did Ancient Egypt as mixed geography/history block, geography coming off somewhat the worse in this partnership, something I may not have noticed without this analysis, and which we are now changing for next year.

From this I notice that we seem to be doing something right in RE and that by contrast, science isn’t as strong.  The tests threw up some common errors; for example, children confusing evaporation and condensation, something we can make sure we work on. Looking at the class with the lowest results, it is striking that the average is depressed by a few children scoring really badly (4 out of 10, 5 out of 15) but these are not the children with SEN but generally children with whom we already have concerns about their attitude to learning.  All the more reason to share these results with their parents.

Even so, the lowest score here is 66%, and that is without doing any recap once the block has finished until the very end of the year, something we will do next year.  I don’t have anything to compare these results with but my gut instinct is that in previous years, children would be hard pressed to remember 2/3’s of what they had learnt that year, let alone remembering 95% of it. As Kirschner and co remind us, if nothing has  been changed in the long term memory, nothing has been learned.[3] Or as Joe Kirby puts it ‘learning is remembering in disguise.’  So next year, I’d like us to aim for average around the 90% mark – mainly achieved by going back over tricky or easily confused content and by keeping a close eye on the usual suspects. Are they actually doing their revision at home?

So, after that lengthy preamble, what are the main pitfalls when using KO’s and MCQ’s for the first time.

1. Deciding which knowledge makes it onto a KO is hard, particularly in history and sometimes RE. One teacher did a KO on Buddhism that had enough information for a degree! In general, the less you know about something, the harder it is to make judicious choices because you simply do not know what is and isn’t really important. In science it is pretty easy, go to BBC bitesize for the relevant topic and use that. For history you actually have to decide how to cut a vast topic down to size. Who will do this deciding? The class teacher, the subject co-ordinator, the SLT or the head teacher? For what it’s worth I’d start with the class teacher so they own the learning, but make sure that is scrutinised by someone else, someone who understands what is at stake here[4]. Quite a few primary schools have developed KO’s this year, so look at these and adapt from there, rather than starting from scratch. I’m going to put ours on @Mr_P_Hillips one  https://padlet.com/jack_helen12/czfxn9ft6n8o once I’ve removed any copyright infringing images. It’s one thing using these images on something just used in one school, quite another putting these up on the web. There are some up already by other people, so do take a look. I definitely think this hive-mind approach ton developing KO’s at primary level is the way ahead.  We are unlikely to have subject specialists for all the subjects in the curriculum in our individual schools, let alone ones who are up to date with the latest debates about makes for a good curriculum. However, by combining forces across the edu-twittersphere, I’m sure we can learn from each other, refining each other’s early attempts until we get something we know is really good. We’ve revised ours twice this year, once in January after a term of writing ones that were too long and then again in July with the benefit of hindsight
2. Seems obvious but…if you are using quizzes, make sure the answers are in the KO! Someone – a secondary school teacher I think – tweeted a while back that KO’s are only KO’s if they can help children self-quiz. I think he was alluding to the grid sort of KO that looks like this (here’s an extract)

When did the ancient Greeks live?	about 3,000 years ago
When was Greek civilisation was most powerful	Between 800 BC and 146 BC.
Ancient Greece was not a single country but was made up of	many city states
Some examples of city states are	Athens, Spartan and Corinth
City states used to fight each other a lot. But if enemies not from Greece attacked they	all joined together to fight back
The first city states started	About 800 BC
All Greeks	Spoke the same language and worshipped the same gods.
Ancient Greece is sometimes called the	‘cradle of Western civilisation’
Cradle of Western civilisation means	The place where European culture all started
The climate in Greece is	Warm and dry
In ancient Greece most people earned their living by	Farming, fishing and trade
The two most powerful city states were	Athens and Sparta

 

As opposed to the same information presented as continuous prose like this.

The ancient Greeks lived about 3,000 years ago

Greek civilisation was most powerful between 800 BC and 146 BC.

Ancient Greece was not a single country but was made up of many city states such as Athens, Spartan and Corinth; but all Greeks spoke the same language and worshipped the same gods.

City states used to fight each other a lot. But if enemies who were not from Greece attacked, they all joined together to fight back.

Ancient Greece has been called ‘the cradle of Western civilisation’ because writing, art, science, politics, philosophy and architecture in Europe all developed from Greek culture.

Ancient Greece had a warm, dry climate, as Greece does today. Most people lived by farming, fishing and trade

The idea with the grid being that children cover one half and write the answers (or questions) as a way of revising.  I get this for secondary children but it doesn’t seem suitable for primary aged children – especially the younger ones. The grid is just too forbidding to read. And we don’t expect them to write out answers for homework to check themselves. Again for younger children that would turn it into such as chore rather something we have found our children actually like doing.  Maybe we might develop a grid alongside the continuous prose? (I did both for Ancient Greece to see which worked better, but went for the prose version in the end).  Maybe for years 5 and 6 only?

When we audited the KO’s against the quizzes we found that the quizzes sometimes asked questions that weren’t on the KO! We spend a couple of staff meetings putting that right so I think that’s all sorted now, but if you spot any omissions when I finally do post our KO’s and quizzes, do let me know. Keep thinking hive mind.

3. If you think KO’s are hard to write, wait until you try to write quizzes! The key to a good mcq is that the other answers – the distractors as they are known in the trade, are suitably plausible. Maybe some of our high scores were down to implausible distractors? However a really good distractor can help you spot misconceptions so are really useful formatively.

Polar explores (year 4,  joint history/geography topic)

Question	Answer A	Answer B	Answer C
Which one of these is NOT a continent?	North America	Europe	Russia
Which on of these is NOT  a country?	Argentina	Africa	Hungary
Pemmican is…	an animal that lives in water and has wings.	high energy food made of meat and fat.	high energy food made out of fish and protein.
Great Britain is surrounded by water so it is an..	island	Ireland	continent
If you travel north east from the U.K you will reach…	Norway	Belgium	Austria
Shackleton’s ship was called…	The Antarctica	The Elephant	The Endurance
When did Henson and Peary make a mad dash for the North Pole?	1909	1609	1979

 

I think this example has good distractors. I particularly like the way the common misconception that Africa is a country is addressed. With the dates, you may argue that children are using deduction rather than recall. I don’t think at this point that is a problem. Besides the fact that by having to think about the question their recall will have been strengthened anyway, we all know hard it is for children to develop a sense of time. 2009 was the year many of year 4 were born so if they think that happened a mere 40 years before they were born – when possibly their teacher was already alive, then we know their sense of chronology is still way out. But I would hope that most children would automatically dismiss this date and then be faced with a choice between 1609 and 1909. Some will just remember 1909 of course. But others might reason that since that 1609 is a really long time ago before the Fire of London whereas 1909 is only just over 100 years ago and appreciate that while the story is set in the past, it’s not that long ago and the technology needed to make the voyage far outstripped that around even in 1666. On the other hand, if the can reason that well about history they probably already know it was 1909! When at primary level we try to get children to remember dates, it is in order to build up their internal time line and relate events relative to one another. By the time children study this in year 4, they have previously learnt about the Magna Carta, Fire of London, the Crimean War and World War 1 (yr 2 ‘nurses’ topic on Florence Nightingale, Mary Seacole and Edith Cavell), the Stone Age, The Iron Age, Ancient Egypt, the Romans, the Anglo Saxons and the Vikings as well as knowing that Jesus was born 2017 years ago (and hopefully beginning to understand BC and why the numbers go backwards). I would hope they would be able to group these into a sequence that was roughly accurate – that’s something else we should develop some assessments for. Elizabeth Carr and Christine Counsell explored this with ks3 children; I’m going to adapt it for ks2 next year.

4. I had hoped to bring all the KO’s and quizzes together into a nicely printed and bound book ready for revision before the final end of year assessments. In fact, ideally this booklet would be ready at the start of next year, so that children could revise from it at spare moments –not only at home and during specific revision lessons, but also when they had a supply teacher for example (for part of the day) , or in those odd 20 minute slots you sometimes get after a workshop has finished or before it starts. I wanted it to be properly printed and spiral bound to look ‘posh’ and look important. However, I really underestimated how much paper all this generates. There was I worrying we weren’t covering enough content – when we gathered it all together it took up 36.4MB. The price for getting a hard copy printed for each child (for their year group only) came to over £1500 – well beyond our budget. So a member of the admin team spent a whole day photocopying everything. By copying stuff back to back we were able to make it slim enough for the photocopier to staple. These were then put into those A4 see-through plastic pouches – we call them ‘slippery fish’ at our school.  They didn’t have anywhere near the gravitas that I’d hoped for – stapled at one corner only with pages inevitably tearing off. The teachers didn’t let them home until the final weekend because they were scared they would get lost. So much for the lovely idea that we would present leavers with a bound copy of all the KO’s and quizzes they had since year 2. So unless you have a friendly parent in the printing business or can get someone to sponsor you – be prepared for a low tech, photocopier intensive solution. In hindsight if every class had had a homework book the KO’s and quizzes went into as we went along, that would have been problem solved.

So there we have it. The top tip is to learn from what is already out there, adapting and honing what others have already done. Then please share back.

[1] I’m talking from a primary perspective here. The message to secondary schools being similar, but more along the lines of ‘forget your PiXL box of magic tricks and start making sure your kids are really learning important stuff.’

[2] Yes, I know, officially RE and science are ‘core’ subjects. They are not really though, in practice, are they. That’s partly what Amanda and Sean are getting at

[3] Kirschner A., Sweller J. and Clark E., 2006. Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching, Educational Psychologist, 41(2), p77

[4] I had intended to write about what is at stake in this blog but its long enough already. Another time, maybe. I do talk about the issues in my intial blog on KO’s mentioned at the start though, if you are looking for help .