Oven-ready, Hello Fresh or Just Eat? What’s the beef about pre-planned lessons?

March 10, 2018July 2, 2022 oldprimarytimercurriculum, education6 Comments

Another weekend, another Twitterstorm. The Policy Exchange have just released a paper arguing for more availability of ‘coherent curriculum programmes’ which include, among other things, lesson plans, text books and lesson resources such as worksheets. Unfortunately the TES reported this as ‘The solution to the workload crisis? Stop teachers designing their own lessons’ which, understandably, has gone down like a bucket of cold sick on Twitter. The fear being that this augers the triumph of the neo-liberal take-over of education, with lesson plans direct from Pearson delivered straight to the classroom by Amazon drone. Or, to refer to my possibly obscure title, delivered by motorbike by Just Eat, with the teacher’s role limited to opening the plastic cartons and serving them out; lamb bhuna tonight, whether you want it or not.

Having read the entire article, what the article is actually proposing is something much more reasonable: debatable, but reasonable. The argument goes that the 2014 National Curriculum is not being implemented as well as it possibly could because the appropriate resources and training to implement it well either don’t exist, or if they do exist, are hard to locate among the myriad of online resources. It bemoans the current situation where many teachers trawl through online resources, of possibly dubious quality, late into the night, as they attempt to plan each and every lesson ‘from scratch,’ although in reality, probably ‘from Twinkl.’[1] This is wrong, the report argues, because the ‘lesson by lesson’ approach is highly unlikely to result in a coherent curriculum that hangs together across the year groups, or that provides sufficient provision for revisiting previous learning. The workload argument is more of a side issue in the report, not its main thrust. Its main thrust is about having a coherent curriculum.

I’m all in favour of coherent curriculum. Indeed, in this blog I argue for curriculum design that has coherence not only within each specific subject, but across subjects. Yet the type of ‘3D’ curriculum I’m advocating is extremely time consuming to write. We’ve been at it for almost 2 years and it’s not where I want it to be yet. The same situation is being replicated across the country. In my ideal world, the DfE would pay me and my selected Twitter mates to devote ourselves to this task, but since (doubtless due to unintended oversight) the report fails to mention me explicitly by name, it comes up with the suggestion that the Government should have a curriculum fund that brings ‘teachers with curriculum planning ideas together with institutions who can provide quality assurance and wider scale distribution.’p36 The kind of institutions it posits as being in a position to do this are multi-academy trusts, learned societies, subject associations and museums. What about schools not in MAT’s, I’d argue? As otherwise that means the vast majority of primary schools would be overlooked, and surely some of us have something to offer? And what about the BBC?

So, while I might argue with the detail about who might and might not secure funding to write detailed, coherent curriculum programmes, I think this is an excellent idea. I’d much rather use a curriculum resource written by a bunch of teachers in partnership with, say, a museum than by most educational publishers. Especially if there existed a range of quality assured, kite marked resources that schools could choose to use, if they wanted to. Many primary schools already use ‘off the peg’ curriculum packages, usually for discrete subjects but occasionally across the curriculum. [2] What is lacking is the all-important question of quality assurance. At the moment, schools buy in all sorts of ready-made packages for aspects of their curriculum. With Ofsted signalling its intention to scrutinise the quality of the curriculum (which in a primary school context is shorthand for ‘everything other than English and maths’), primary headteachers are tearing their hair out trying to rustle up a coherent curriculum offer for the foundation subjects while secondary heads fret about ks3. Just off the top of my head, I can think of the following resources that primary schools of my acquaintance use.[3] Jolly Phonics, Third Space Learning, Cornerstones Curriculum, White Rose, Literacy Shed Plus, International Primary Curriculum, Developing Experts, Jigsaw PHSE, Discovery RE Val Sabin PE, Rigolo, Discovery Education Coding, ReadWriteInc, Maths Mastery, Charanga.

The thing that strikes me going through this list is that there are lots of different resources out there for maths and phonics and plenty for those really specialist areas of the primary curriculum where many primary teachers are more than willing to ‘fess up to having little to no subject knowledge and welcome explicit handholding; PE, music, computing. But for geography and history, I know of nothing except for Cornerstones and IPC, which offer many subjects. I think it is fair to say to both parties that the IPC is not quite what the authors of the 2014 National Curriculum quite had in mind. And neither of these curriculum packages have the sort of horizontal, vertical and diagonal links that I would argue an excellent curriculum should be striving to build within and across subjects.

However, I really do understand the horror some teachers are expressing on Twitter today about having the planning of lessons taken away from them. The two main objections are that no ‘off the peg’ lesson can ever hope to meet the specific learning needs of the diverse classes we all teach and that planning lessons specifically for one’s children was one of the best bits of teaching, part of what made the job rewarding.

So, finally, let’s get back to the title. In the report, the author John Blake suggests that coherent curricular programmes could be thought of as ‘oven-ready’ – presumably a sort of educational ready meal that just needs a bit of warming up. He argues that these would be especially useful for teachers new to the profession or new to a particular subject. And to be honest, even those of us who love lesson planning probably don’t mind using ‘ready meals’ for some subjects where they lack subject knowledge. If you told most primary school teachers that they were not allowed to use externally produced resources for computing, MFL or music, for example, and had to plan every lesson entirely from scratch, then there would be tears. (Except for the highly knowledgeable minority, of course, who might not understand what all the fuss was about).

Blake then goes on to talk about ‘the final foot.’ What he means here is how teachers could take an ‘oven ready’ resource and then use their professional expertise to adapt it as necessary for the realities of their class. Much of the groundwork having already been done, the teacher is freed up to tweak the lesson to fit their children. This is what I meant by the ‘Hello Fresh’ approach. Hello Fresh is one of those companies that delivers boxes of food with all the ingredients you need to make the particular recipes it also provides. Everything is already in exactly the right quantity, all the cook needs to do is chop, peel, and actually cook the ingredients. Unlike a ready meal, this gives you scope either to follow the recipe slavishly, or, for those who feel confident, add or omit ingredients according to your family’s preferences, play about with cooking times (because you know your cooker best, right) or even go completely rogue and use the ingredients in a completely different recipe, maybe adding in other ingredients bought elsewhere and chucking others.

Yet I understand that some teachers will still object and see this as an assault on their professional autonomy and creativity. When I was a class teacher, I loved lesson planning. So it was with some trepidation that 4 years ago we tried out a particular maths scheme that has very detailed, partially scripted lesson plans. I’m not going to say which one because I’m not specifically arguing for the merits of that particular programme or not, but about the idea of using very detailed plans written by others. (Besides which, many of you will either already know or be able to guess). Anyway, we got funding with one class. The class teacher was happy to give it a go, though she was already an experienced, skilled teacher. The reason why she soon loved it was because it wasn’t a ready meal, it was more of a ‘Hello Fresh’ kind of thing. In fact, you had to tweak the lessons because, as the programme makes quite clear, they are aimed towards the average child and your actual children aren’t average. Some will need more challenge, more depth, others will need more support. So the teacher needed to think about how to adapt every lesson for the particulars of their class. The teacher also needed to decide whether or not to spend more time on a particular lesson, skip over lessons if the class didn’t need them, swap suggested manipulatives for something else, and had the freedom to design their own worksheets or to not use any worksheets at all.

What made this possible was that the programme wasn’t really a set of resources, it was a training programme, of which resources were a part. Each unit of work included a video explaining key concepts, an overview, links to articles and research, as well as the lesson plans and flipchart slides to go with it. These resources are excellent and go far beyond what any of us in school would have been able to offer. And ours is a school unusually blessed with knowledgeable maths teachers. There was also some central training and the expectation that the maths leader was regularly coaching teachers new to the programme. Indeed, during the first year, our maths leader, a year 6 teacher, had to teach year 1 maths once a week using the programme, so that she became familiar with it. Without this training, the resource would not have had half the impact it did.

Now you may argue, if you had to do all that tweaking, what on earth is the point? You might as well have designed the whole thing yourself. Well no, even with the tweaking, lesson planning was much quicker. But why our first teacher really loved it, and why the subsequent teachers to use it also love it, is because it is so clever. The progression and the way it comes back to topics again and again, the way it builds in reasoning at every step, the way it moves children away from reliance on counting and towards reasoning based on known facts is excellent. We might rate ourselves as excellent maths teachers who can plan fantastic lessons, but we simply do not have the expertise or time to develop a scheme of such quality. What really struck me doing lesson observations one week was how brilliantly progression is planned into the scheme. I saw addition lessons in year 1, 3 and 4 and in each lesson exactly the same structure was used, but with increasing complexity. Given its obvious superiority to anything we could produce, it would be foolish and arrogant to insist that we had the ‘freedom’ to plan our own lessons, just because we liked it. Nor do teachers feel reduced to mere delivery bots. I really feared they might, but that just didn’t happen. Because the lessons made sense. And where, very occasionally, a lesson didn’t seem to work, they had the freedom to teach it again, their way.

That’s not to say we don’t occasionally do things differently. For example, I think this way of teaching telling the time is better, so we don’t use all of their resources for that – just some. And we are encouraged to comment on lessons and suggest improvements which are listened to. Because the resource is online, rather than a textbook, when they adapt the programme, we don’t have to throw out costly resources. Were there to be similar quality programmes in other areas of the curriculum, I would buy them like a shot.

However, I also really understand that many teaches love the creativity that planning affords and would be loath to relinquish it. On the other hand, just because you love doing something, doesn’t mean everybody does. As Michael Fordham says:

michael f

Instead, as an alternative to moving into leadership, more experienced teachers should have the option to move into curriculum design themselves. This is what happens in Singapore, where experienced teachers have options to move into senior specialist roles that work on areas such as curriculum design, testing, educational research or educational psychology.

With talk here of sabbaticals for teachers, maybe one sabbatical opportunity could be to work within a curriculum development team, producing resources for others to use?

[1] The report doesn’t mention Twinkl, that’s me, being facetious.

[2] I can only comment in detail on primary schools. Maybe it’s different in secondary schools where teachers are subject specialists? But from talking to many secondary teachers, I don’t think it is as different as all that.

[3] Inclusion in this list does not mean I think the resource is either good or bad. We use some of these; some I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole.

The 3D curriculum that promotes remembering

October 28, 2017January 21, 2018 oldprimarytimercurriculum, education, memory23 Comments

In my previous blog I explained about how memory works, and how teachers can use strategies from cognitive science such as retrieval practice to promote long term learning. After all, the learned curriculum is the only curriculum that actually counts in the end.

The curriculum is the means by which we ensure that all our children get their fair share of the rich cultural inheritance our world affords. A good curriculum empowers children with the knowledge they are entitled to: knowledge that will nourish both them and the society of which they are members. Because, as Angela Rayner, Labour shadow education secretary says, knowledge belongs to the many, not the few.

But if children don’t remember what we have taught them, then even the richest curriculum is pointless. Knowledge can’t empower if it is forgotten. So as well as thinking about what is the richest, best material to put into our curriculum, we also have to structure our curriculum in a way that make remembering almost inevitable. This blog relies very heavily on the thinking of Christine Counsell, so much so I did ask her if it was alright to use her ideas about building a memorable curriculum. She was much more concerned that the ideas got ‘out there’ than to claim ownership of them, but much of what follows is a result of her sharing her vision of a memorable, knowledge rich curriculum with me. The actual examples from different year groups come from me, so if you find the specifics lacking, that’s my fault, not hers.

Schools tend to spend a lot of time thinking about how children are going to learn, rather than what. Then when schools start to think about what they want children to learn – when they start to think hard about their curriculum – they overlook planning systematically how they can build their curriculum so that children remember it.

When I first started teaching there was no National Curriculum, or SATS and no Ofsted. Schools were completely free to teach whatever they liked. Indeed, it was often down to the individual teacher to choose what they wanted to teach. My mother was a primary teacher and her colleague said she didn’t like maths so didn’t teach it. That’s pretty extreme. But it really was more or less up to you. The school I started in was more prescriptive than most – we had maths scheme and a reading scheme which means it was ultra-traditional for its time, but I was still asked what I wanted to teach for my first ‘topic’. Your topic drove the curriculum. The idea was that under the umbrella theme, you tried to find bits of learning from each subject that linked with it. So, for example, I decided for my first topic that I would do ‘the weather’ – actually quite a good topic, as it goes. So we made rain gauges and wind socks and measured rainfall, wind direction and temperature, we learnt about wind speeds and the Beaufort scale in a geography/science combo. We made mobiles with the symbols from weather forecasts. (I think that was art but it might have been DT). We wrote stories about storms. We played percussion instruments to make a storm. RE? well Noah’s Ark, obviously. We didn’t do any history that term. Not in a deliberately planned way, but just because it didn’t fit. Well I suppose I could have done the history of umbrellas or something.

This approach hasn’t completely died out either. Not long ago, some poor year 6 teacher on Twitter asked for help in planning what to teach in history that term to fit with her topic. Her topic was roller coasters. A topic chosen not by her but by some senior manager who decided that since going on a roller coaster was fun, learning about them would be too.

Actually planning a topic like this was quite fun and the best teachers were really inventive and taught good stuff. The rationale behind this approach was that by linking stuff together, it would be more interesting and hence more memorable than teaching a series of atomised, unrelated subjects. Strong links between the subjects was its raison d’etre. The problem was that it was just so arbitrary. It was quite possible for children to do the same topic twice (or even three times) because it was just down to the individual teacher. Whole subjects could be left untaught for term after term after term, just because they didn’t ‘fit’ with the topic, and not because a strategic decision had been made to concentrate on something else. Or, in a desperate attempt to shoehorn a subject into a topic, tenuous links were made. I once joked that my topic that term was ‘tenuous links across the curriculum’. I was chatting to Christine Counsell the other day about this and she told me about a teacher who was doing a topic on colours. Desperate to fit in some history, the teacher plumped for teaching them about the Black Death!

But actually, this emphasis on links wasn’t completely misguided. If we want to build a curriculum that promotes remembering, we will absolutely need to build links in. In fact, we will need to build in those links in a far more systematic and structural way than the ‘topic web’ approach ever imagined. The very bones of our curriculum across the years and across subjects will need to link up in a highly well thought out way, so that knowledge taught in one subject is explicitly reinforced and revisited in a not only in other subjects, but in subsequent years. In this way, key concepts and vocabulary are reinforced because new words and concepts are encountered repeatedly in meaningful contexts. I am calling this way of building a curriculum a 3D curriculum, for reasons which I hope will become obvious.

First of all, vertical links should be deliberated constructed within a subject so that over the years, key ‘high yield’ concepts are encountered again and again. Not only are these concepts practised again and again through retrieval practice while the unit of work is being taught, the curriculum design provides planned opportunities to revisit the concept in subsequent years.

So, for example, let us consider the word ‘tyrant’ and its associates ‘tyranny’ and ‘tyrannical’ in the context of teaching history.

We first meet a ‘tyrant’ in year 1, when our students encounter King John (of Magna Carta fame) and learn that he was (until the barons got him) a tyrant. We don’t meet any tyrants in history again until in year 5 when we encounter Dionysius of Syracuse (the definitive tyrant) where his tyranny is counterpoised with the democracy of Ancient Greek city states. While its quite a stretch to expect that children will remember the word ‘tyrant’ from 4 years previously, it provides an opportunity to remind students about the Magna Carta and how power is limited in Britain. Then in year 6, we can compare Hitler with Churchill. By now, we also know the adjective ‘tyrannical.’

Alongside this, we need to develop horizontal links between subjects in a year. These are the sort of links we loved back in the old days of topic webs. In year 3 students learn about rivers in geography and the importance of the river Nile when learning about the history of Ancient Egypt. In year 4 we learn that Vikings invade England, microbes invade bodies and about invasion games in PE.

Important grammar concepts, such as nominalisation – so important for academic writing – are also addressed when children write a non-chronological report or an explanation about something they have learnt in another subject. For example, children are taught that rather than writing that the Nazi’s invaded Poland we teach it is more effective to write about the invasion. Instead of saying the French were defeated we write about the defeat of the French and later about the opposition and resistance of the French.

Finally, we need to map out the diagonal links. That is to say, links that join concepts across both year groups and across subjects. So when in year 3 children learn in RE the story of the Exodus and encounter the brutality of Pharaoh they are reminded that he is behaving like a tyrant – a term they learnt in history in year 1! To give another example, the word ‘source’ is the place where a river begins when studying the River Nile in year 3, but is also the person or book that provides information for a news story or for historical research when we discuss primary and secondary sources in later years. In English in year 6, students revisit our beloved word ‘tyranny’ when they encounter the Warden in ‘Holes’ and her tyrannical regime. A later study of the biography of Harriet Tubman affords the opportunity to describe slavery as being a form of tyranny, but of one group of people who ‘rule’ over another.

Each time a concept is encountered within a different context, not only is the concept more likely to be remembered, the understanding of that concept becomes more nuanced.

What is really important is that this revisiting is done in a deliberate, planned way and not as an inconsequential aside along the lines of ‘remember when you learnt about plants’ without explicitly reminding the students exactly what it is about plants that you want them to link with what they are learning now. So for example, explicitly revisiting the different types of plants that grow in different biomes when learning about adaptation. References to previously studied content need to build on or develop previous learning, as well as strengthening students’ ability to remember the terms. None of this should be ad hoc. These links form the bones of the curriculum. That’s why we can talk of the curriculum as the progression model.

I’m not saying building such a curriculum is easy. Primary school teachers are not used to knowing what children have learnt in foundation subjects in previous year groups, let alone which key concepts might provide fruitful opportunities for development. In other words, which key concepts really are ‘key’. Indeed, in my experience, most primary schools are only just beginning to map out the kind of knowledge they think children should be learning, let alone thinking about the route map of key concepts within and across years and subjects.

Yet imagine the incredible head start our children would have if they arrived at secondary school will a sophisticated understanding, grounded in different contexts of the following concepts that I’ve lifted from our knowledge organisers: I’ve tried to give the word in its nominalised form where possible but obviously we need to make sure they know the other words in the ‘family’ too.

(Primarily from history) Ruler, king, monarch, monarchy, reign, democracy, election, tyranny, dictator, opposition, resistance, rebellion, invasion, conquest, triumph, parliament, government, tribe, emperor, empire, defeat, occupation, exploration, taxation, civilisation, citizen, culture, state, military, conflict, alliance, treaty, coalition, surrender, warrior, poverty, flee, exile, hostility, community, migration, persecution, oppression, liberation, neutral, eye-witness, source, archaeologist, expedition, navigation, exploration

(Primarily from RE) Creation, gratitude, compassion, victim, sacrifice, sacred, holy, pagan, monotheism, polytheism, immortal, salvation, forgiveness, sin, incarnation, reincarnation, prophet, liberation, obedience, commandment, prayer, worship, wisdom, commitment, faith, belief,

(Primarily from geography) Climate, weather, temperature, erosion, fertile, irrigation, meander, crop, trade, settlement, environment, abundance, scarcity, resources, habitat, adaptation, population, predator, prey, immigration

(Primarily for science) Flammable, conductor, insulator, dissolving, soluble, solvent, evaporation, condensation, pitch, volume, circuit, particle, reversible, irreversible, extinct, orbit, reflection, reproduction, sexual, asexual, friction.

This list is self-evidently far too long. We are only at the beginnings of building our 3D curriculum.

I gave a talk partly based on this blog at the conference at Reach Academy last Monday and someone asked me the very sensible question, am I talking about Isabel Beck’s tier two words? In case you haven’t read her work (and you really should, it’s all about vocabulary), Beck divides words into 3 categories; tier 1 are everyday words like table, cup, house; tier 3 words are technical, subject specific words such as photosynthesis or glacier; tier 2 are where we find words that provide a more precise or mature ways of referring to ideas they already know about. For example, knowing the word benevolent as well as kind or fortunate as well as lucky. See here for more. Tier 2 words are the words teachers should really concentrate on, argues Beck, because they lend a sophistication and maturity to communication that many child may not encounter at home and hence need explicit instruction.

While I agree with this, I think the key concepts we need to build a 3D curriculum from a set I’m going to call tier 2.5! I’m still reflecting on this but I think the key concepts we need are ones that although often grounded in a specific subject domain (so tier 3) are also used in a metaphorical or looser way outside that domain (so tier 2 possibly?) For example, meander has a very specific – in fact tier 3 – usage in geography yet is useful word to use to describe thoughts or route through shopping malls. It’s probably not quite rich enough to from part of the endoskeleton of our curriculum, though ideally all our teachers will know that in year 3, children learn about meanders so that should the occasion occur where meander would be a useful verb, they will explicit reference river bends in their explanation.

Looking at my long list, it seems that the humanities afford more words able to be co-opted for use in other domains, whereas science vocabulary is more likely to be hyper-specific and domain bound. I also note that most of my history words tend to be about power and a fair few geography words about economics. I’m not sure if that’s by lefty bias coming into play or not? But since power and money are such powerful drivers, it is no wonder that words which formally mean one thing in once context – empire, for example – are pressed into service to describe more the commonplace human interactions of the power crazy. English teachers, I presume, would look on that long list of words first encountered in history lessons and be delighted to think that children would come to English lessons already with an understanding, albeit in a very specific context, of the word; an understanding is exploited when authors use words figuratively. This is much less likely to happen with scientific words such as isotope. There are however still links to be made: coalition/coalesce for example.

Much of the detail of this approach is still tentative. I welcome comments.

Education and Stockholm Syndrome: the road to recovery

August 10, 2017August 10, 2017 oldprimarytimeraccountability, curriculum, education, Ofsted, primary education9 Comments

In 1973, 4 bank employees in Stockholm were taken hostage and held by their captors for 6 days. Yet when they were released, not one of them would testify against their captors; on the contrary, they raised money for their defense.

In June of this year, at the Festival of Education, Amanda Spielman released the English educational establishment from its captivity to a narrowly data-driven paradigm of educational excellence. Yet so strongly has this paradigm held us in its grasp for so many years, it is hard to let it go. More than that, it is difficult to appreciate quite how perniciously this paradigm has permeated into our psyches, so that we find it difficult to detect just how far its corrupting influence distorts what we do. We suffer from a data-induced myopia. There are a myriad of possibilities we cannot ‘see’ because our focus is firmly fixed elsewhere. Our sense of what ‘good’ looks like has been so warped, we flounder when challenged to concentrate ‘on the curriculum and the substance of education, not preparing your pupils to jump through a series of accountability hoops.’ Surely ‘good’ looks like good results? Take away this guiding light and we are all at sea. You mean, my good results aren’t enough anymore? You mean I can have good results and still be bad? Those wicked jailers have taken away our security blanket; no wonder we want it back!

The penny is slowly beginning to drop. Now we don’t know what ‘bad’ looks like. Before, as long as we cleared those hoops, we were ok. If we cleared them in spectacular style, we might even be double ok with a cherry on the top. But unless we did something really horrific like having out of date plasters or the wrong type of fencing, we could be pretty sure we weren’t actually bad, as long as our results held up. Until now.

Of course we’ve always said there’s too narrow a focus on data and there’s more to education than English and maths and what about the arts and personal development and so on and so forth. But when our jailers not only agree with us but blow up the jail, without this familiar reference point we find it hard to negotiate the landscape. We keep looking back to where the jail once was to orientate ourselves.

In May, a month before Amanda’s talk, we held a governor away day to think about our ‘vision’. It was a good day. We spent much more time looking at our values than our results and ended up with our vision statement, which at the time I was really please with. It went like this:

Our Vision

‘Learning to live life in all its fullness’

Maintain and improve pupil progress and achievement within a responsibly balanced budget.
Reduce educational inequality through maximising progress for all.
Encouraging personal development in line with the school’s values.
Working in collaboration and not competition with local schools for the good of all our pupils: ‘all pupils are our pupils’.

But now, when I look through it with Spielman-spectacles, is see how prison bound it is. 3) and 4) are ok, it’s 1) and 2) I have the problem with. Let’s look at 1). (Forget the bit about the budget, that’s just an acknowledgement of the challenge of maintaining provision in the face of a drastically reduced budget)

Maintain and improve pupil progress and achievement.

We all know what this is code for. What it really means is ‘get good Sats results’ in English and maths. Now I’m not saying that Amanda thinks for one moment that getting good results isn’t important, of course it is. But we’ve forgotten that these results are an imperfect proxy for being suitably literate and numerate rather than an end in themselves. This is compounded by 2)

Reduce educational inequality through maximising progress for all

This is code for ‘make sure pupil premium children get good results too.’

Which is a worthy aim, as far as it goes, but it’s all just a bit reductionist. Amanda’s speech, on the other hand, shared a vision of education ‘broadening minds, enriching communities and advancing civilization.’ Now getting good Sats results will contribute to that to a certain degree; let’s not understate the case. Minds are not going to be broadened very much unless children can read and write well and are confident in their use of maths. There are many things that might enrich a community and advance civilization, but most of them are greatly helped by agents who are literate and numerate.

It’s the fixation on measuring things (implicit here) that’s the problem. To an outsider, ‘progress’ and ‘achievement’ sound like perfectly good things to aim for. But we all know that progress ain’t progress as the lay person might understand it. It’s Progress™, something quantifiable, something on a spreadsheet, something with the illusion of tangibility. Our vision statements may be vague and aspiration, but that’s ok because pretty soon they will be translated into smart targets with numbers and everything. But, as the saying goes, measure what you value because you will value what we measure. Our jailers measured us relentlessly and soon we valued their measurements above all things. We may have denied this with our words but our actions spoke louder.

Of course we want to broaden minds, enrich communities and advance civilisation. That’s a dream job description! But mark my words, before long someone will invent a ‘broadened mind’ rubric so we can report how many microGoves of Progress™ we have made in the mind broadening business.

Grade	Descriptor
9	A superlatively broad mind. Sublime community enrichment. Establishment of heaven on earth.
8	An extremely broad mind. Excellent community enrichment. Rapid advancement of civilisation.
7	An impressively broad mind. Impressive community enrichment. Notable advancement of civilisation.
6	A broad mind. Community enriched. Civilisation advancing.
5	A mainly broad mind with occasional narrowness. Community showing fledgling signs of enrichment. Civilisation inching forwards.
4	Some narrowness with outbreaks of broadening. Community just about managing, civilisation in two minds whether to go forwards of backwards
3	Quite a narrow mind, community a bit impoverished, civilisation retreating slowly
2	A narrow mind, community impoverished, civilisation in retreat
1	A very narrow mind, community very impoverished, civilisation put to rout.

(With thanks to Alex Ford for the inspiration and this great blog, written about those who, like Hiroo Onoda, are behind with the news)

A few people have asking me recently about curriculum development and wanting to know more about our attempts to create a knowledge rich curriculum that builds cultural capital. A question that sometimes comes up is, ‘Why are you doing this? How is it contributing to rising standards?’ ‘Standards’ of course being another code word for ‘great Sats results in English and maths. As if everything has to be justified – especially major initiatives – in terms of the payback in test results. Cos that’s what the prison guards used to fixate on, so that’s what we find it hard to think beyond.

But surely, I hear you saying, a broad, knowledge-rich curriculum will result in higher standards across the board. Why, I said this myself here. I argued that because inference depends on broad general knowledge ‘cutting back on foundation subjects to improve reading is a false economy.’ This is true, of course, of improving reading in a qualitative sense. However, while knowledge is essential for the comprehending of reading, the kind of knowledge gaps that thwart children in the Sats Reading Comprehension™ tend to be about why cats appear well looked after because they have shiny coats – not the sort of stuff you study in history and geography or science for that matter. The idea that curriculum time and financial and human resources might be poured into something that might not make that much impact on our data, on Standards™, is one that is going to take some time for schools to get their head around. It seems reckless, profligate when looked at from a prison perspective.

Although if we dare lift our eyes above the accountability horizon and contemplate the impact of a broad, knowledge-rich curriculum on the longer term achievement of our pupils at secondary school and beyond, we will see that we have given them the intellectual nourishment they need to thrive. We need to think hard about what words like ‘standards’ and ‘achievement’ and ‘progress’ might mean, when liberated from data-jail. Maybe it looks like broadening minds, enriching communities and advancing civilization?

The highs and lows of knowledge organisers: an end of year report

July 30, 2017July 31, 2017 oldprimarytimerassessment, curriculum, education, knowledge organisers, primary education12 Comments

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.

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
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.

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.

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 .

Curating knowledge/organising knowledge

January 15, 2017January 15, 2017 oldprimarytimercurriculum, education7 Comments

Jon Brunskill has started off an interesting exchange on twitter after posting two blogs about knowledge organisers in primary schools including one about the Apollo 11 Mission to the Moon. Some commentators don’t like the idea much on the grounds that it is a disembodied list of facts and therefore dull and uninteresting. To which Jon (and I) reply that of course it would be were that the only thing that was presented in the lesson. However, bringing knowledge to life in a lively way is the job of the teacher; a job made much easier by having spent time deciding which knowledge to include and which to discard. Among the myriad of concepts, definitions, dates, events, descriptions , quotations, hypotheses, opinions and arguments that we could potentially include, what exactly is it that is so crucial to the topic that it warrants inclusion on the KO? What knowledge should we curate? ( Those of us of a left-wing bent could decide to call our knowledge organisers knowledge curators to make it clear that despite having gone all ‘knowledgey’ and seemingly in the same camp as Lord Nash, Civitas and Michael Gove, our socialist credentials remain intact and we acknowledge that the selection of knowledge is a political act. We could do, but people would laugh at us. Even more.)

The national curriculum, punctiliously specific in English and maths, relaxes into vague suggestions for the wider curriculum, particularly in history. I’d rather that than the breathless charge through British history that was in Mr Gove’s draft national curriculum (p165 and following) which appeared to assume curriculum time was infinitely expandable. However, the lack of explicit direction leaves non specialist primary teachers with the task of choosing what to include and what to leave out within topic headings such as ‘the Roman Empire and its impact on Britain’ followed by 5 non statutory suggestions. Does that mean we should try and pick one of the five? Do all five? If we did something completely different, would that matter? Given that curriculum time for foundation subjects is all too finite, what should make the final cut?

Other commentators like the concept of knowledge organisers but want to refine the idea, something that Jon welcomes; ‘the friction from the resistance is ultimately…what will polish the diamond.’ Do let’s have more constructive twitter/blog exchanges like this that help us all reflect and improve what we do. It is particularly useful to have contributions from secondary specialists explaining what areas of knowledge it is most useful for children to have acquired during their primary years.

As St Matthias, we too have been using KO’s since September, so I thought I’d post some of ours in to help discussion along. I didn’t write these; the class teachers did. I’m really pleased with how they’ve taken to the idea, but there’s a lot more to this KO business than it seems and they will all need polishing and refining further. I’ve included three, a history focused one from year 2 on the Fire of London, another history focused one from year 3 on Ancient Egypt and a geography focused one that uses the stories of Ernest Shackleton and Matthew Henson as a context for learning about continents and countries. All three units cross over with literacy, but unlike Jon’s, the KO’s were not written in order that the children could write a non fiction piece of writing at the end. Instead the children write shorter pieces of writing throughout the unit. However, I like Jon’s idea, so maybe that is something we will develop.

As a result, ours are a bit different from Jon’s. For example, they contain pictures as well as text. This is deliberate. Partly because a diagram can sometimes express information more succinctly and lucidly than text can; Jon’s KO would in my opinion be improved by a diagram of the lunar module and command module and a diagram showing the path the mission took, along these lines and partly because images of the major players bring the text to life. For example, it reminds us that Matthew Henson was African American. Maybe I’m not sufficiently hardcore; the pictures do make the KO’s look more inviting, more primary. Compare for example with the excellent, but stern looking example in Robert Peal’s blog. But each picture takes up space that could contain more text; so each picture needs to be justifiable beyond being pretty. For example in the Year 2 one below, I think the map and the picture of Pepyes have a stronger claim to space than the other two pictures. However I am happy with the text; it doesn’t seem to me that anything important has been omitted so they can stay. The geography one on polar explorers obviously needs its maps as learning where things are on the globe forms the key knowledge pupils are meant to learn in this unit. The year 3 one originally had an annotated a map of the Nile which I replaced with more text; partly because I was worried about being sued for copyright by Dorling Kindersley and partly because I though thought there was not enough emphasis on historical causation or chronology.

Which brings us to the heart of the matter. If our KO’s are not to become just lists of highly specific fun facts – hey canopic jars or pemmican anyone – then they must have some transferability. Hush my mouth, I’ve said a bad word! What I mean is that in a history KO we must make sure that at least some of the facts we teach them knit the different topics they will study together by developing chronological understanding, and understanding causality and consequence. Of course these are not free standing ‘skills’ that make sense without the facts, but especially for us primary non specialists, it would be easy to omit those all important aspects out of ignorance. Which is why on the Ancient Egypt KO below, I made sure it included as facts to be learnt, awareness that Ancient Egypt occurred contemporaneously with the late Stone Age, Bronze and Iron Ages; while we were grubbing about in the mud, a far advanced civilisation was flourishing elsewhere.

Chronology is notoriously badly understood by primary children. I’ve come across year 3 children who think the tallest teacher is the oldest, despite having youthful tall teachers and short grey haired ones. The idea that ‘the past’ is not just one ‘place’ but many, all related to each other and some occurring simultaneously seems to be very difficult for some children to grasp. Certainly we must use number lines and teach dates and remember that chronological awareness encompasses duration and interval as well as sequence. For this reason, I think that Jon’s KO should have the fact that JFK was president and that this happened when Queen Elizabeth II was queen. Maybe all history KO’s used in the UK; elsewhere the chronological anchor fact will need to reference whoever is significant in that locale). For that matter, our polar explorers one should reference Edward VII for Matthew Henson and George V for Shackleton. I don’t think learning dates by themselves is sufficient. The dates need fleshing out with explicit links stressed. Who was on the throne? What else was going on in the world?

We’ve also tweaked our KO’s so that they include explanations as to why things happened. Ancient Egypt flourished because the land was fertile and the deserts provided protection from invaders. The land was fertile because the Nile flooded. London burned because wood is flammable, dry wood even more so and the houses close together. Buckets were leather because plastic had not been invented. Shackleton could not radio for help because long-range radio didn’t exist. Pemmican was good to eat because in extreme cold you need high energy foods. Causality cannot be taught in a vacuum aside from knowledge; it is a concept that becomes denser the more times children encounter different scenarios needing different…or not so different…explanations. Having studied the Fire of London (houses close together: fire spread easily), Ancient Egypt (River Nile floods yearly: soil very fertile) and Shackleton (Antarctic too cold for plants: very little lives there) the transferable concept that the physical environment influences the prosperity or otherwise of those who live there gains traction.

I’m looking again at Jon’s KO on the Apollo 11 mission. He explains the term ‘quarantine’ and ‘space race’. ‘Space race’ will, we hope, be a small step, as it were in our student eventually grasping that explorations of distant unknown regions are very costly and therefore funded by very rich patrons and function as, among other things, a status symbol. I’m sure there was discussion in class about why there had to be separate lunar and command modules, rather than one module that landed on the moon and then returned to earth. However, given the complexity of that explanation and the age of the pupils (6 going on 7), I can see why Jon hasn’t tried to condense that into a sentence!

As I mentioned above, Jon wrote his KO in order for his class to have some rich facts so that they could then, in literacy, write an information text. It was not written as a history topic per se, even though Neil Armstrong is included in the KS1 history National Curriculum as an example of a significant individual whom one might use to compare with Christopher Columbus. Having learnt about Armstrong in literacy, I would urge Jon to then do that comparison, thus exploiting the obvious points – and reasons for – the similarities and the differences between the two explorers.

By saying there should be some transferability of ideas between different topics, I’m not saying that’s the only function of the unit. Knowledge is neither the master not the slave of transferability, but rather its bedrock. Maybe transferability is the wrong word. We teach what at first seem like isolated islands of ‘knowledge’,then bit by bit we realise these islands are joined in ways we couldn’t at first realise. The more we know, the more we are able to predict, infer, make links. When deciding which knowledge to teach, we make choices based on what specific facts educated children should know, regardless of wider, more general links and what might be more useful. For example, in an earlier blog I contrasted learning about the history of chocolate and the history of the Romans and made the point that learning about the Romans in year 3 helps you understand more about British and European history in general and about how Christianity became a global religion. As I said, knowledge may be power but not all knowledge is equally powerful.

The other ‘transferable’ element within our KO’s is vocabulary. Most of the vocabulary within our KO’s is necessarily very context-specific. However a few words are more generalizable and are ‘high yield’ words children will encounter and need to understand again and again, across many different domains of knowledge. Looking at the KO’s above (and Jon’s) I find the words flammable, eyewitness, expedition, navigate, crop, fertile, trade, afterlife, archaeology, crew, quarantine, module all of which are necessary for understanding many other areas of the curriculum. Again, Jon wrote his for a different reason and maybe did a separate one when the class studied the solar system but I wonder whether ‘expedition’ ‘voyage’ ‘orbit’ , ‘atmosphere’ and ‘launch and ‘gravity’ ( both briefly mentioned) should explicitly feature in the vocabulary column.

So within our KO’s, alongside the specific dates, names, places and other vocabulary specific to the topic in hand, we must also include those high dividend words that will reoccur across the curriculum, rather like Isabel Beck’s tier two words that I wrote about here. (You will see the St Matthias year 2 one also includes the tier one words oven and bakery and might wonder why such basic words are included. A large proportion of our children speak English as an additional language and it is exactly these words that are primarily used in a domestic sphere that they might not ever hear in English unless we explicitly tell them – for example I remember a very eloquent year 6 child referring to a cup and plate, because she had never heard the word saucer because the world of the kitchen was a world where she only spoke Bengali.)

The more I write, the more complicated it seems. I started out just wanting key facts, then facts including dates and quotations, then some chronological anchor facts (if its history), possibly a diagram or two, definitely a map if it is geography, some explicit causality and now tier two type vocabulary. Am I asking it to bear too much? Have a departed from the basic concept? I look at Robert Peal’s KS3 KO (link above) and his is just a long list of facts (including some specific vocabulary eg fealty) in question and answer form, and then a brief key dates summary at the bottom. I presume that because the pupils learn all this knowledge and have it at their finger tips, he can then spend more lesson time talking about causes, making links across time periods and describing similarities and differences. Maybe this side of things needs to be more explicit in primary KO’s because a) the children are younger and know and understand less and have less well developed vocabularies and b) the teachers are generalists who might otherwise forget to talk about these aspects. Quality text bools are in short supply and even if they existed we couldn’t afford them.

Here are three knowledge organisers from years 2,3 and 4. I welcome comments.

fire of London ko.PNG geog-ko-uk-europe