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Know more and remember more

We've just had our section 8 visit from Ofsted and one major point of feedback asked us how our curriculum helped children to know more and remember more. This is now a big focus for my school, one which I hope to be an instrumental part of in bringing in change and improvements. 

Myself and two other wider curriculum subject leaders met with Ofsted, an experience from which I learned a lot and has fired me up with all sorts of plans and ideas. We were expecting a visit from Ofsted and so had prepared to answer questions about remote learning, how we were identifying learning gaps and what we were intending to do about it as a result. What I hadn't been prepared for was a full on pedagogical discussion where we justified how we were using principles from cognitive science to underpin learning in our curriculum - I'm sure other schools are doing just this, it just wasn't something my school has really thought about. In my nervous over-excited waffle I managed to mention spaced learning, long-term learning and explicit vocabulary, but I could have done better. It was only after the interview that I 'got' what they were after. 

Fortunately, after the lockdown half term I decided to bring in knowledge organisers to assess the science topic which had been taught in the previous remote learning half term. It's an idea I'd been planning for a while and I had actually sent home a science knowledge organiser with children when they left at christmas, thinking that we'd use them in class - somehow - it was a plan coming together, rather than a thought out plan. Following the stress and chaos of the first few weeks of remote learning and teaching simultaneously, any ideas I had about the knowledge organiser went out the window. 

However, I am proud of my school that we started using them as an assessment of and for learning. I made up one, based on the marvellous twinkl model, and this showed me just how much the kids couldn't explain concepts. Does this tell me about their learning or about how unfit the knowledge organiser design was? Year 6 and 3/4 made up their own ones, and Year 6 used the feedback to review classification. Year 3/4 found that children didn't have a clue, and therefore used the knowledge organiser as a teaching point - one step better than me. The second knowledge organiser I made for assessing the learning on a different topic just before Easter also didn't overwhelm me with showing how much learning they'd done. It did show me that even the top students don't use scientific vocabulary when they try to explain concepts - this time on creating a fair comparative test. When we marked it together they began to understand that I wanted them to use the right words, which some did when they reformulated sentences verbally.  

I have now spent a bit more time researching how to make best use of knowledge organisers, and they aren't a silver bullet. I have made another science one and a geography one now for summer term 1, starting with them to teach the topic, rather than just as a summative assessment, will hopefully mean children will know what is expected of them by the end of the unit. 

How I will use the knowledge organisers next half term: 

1) send them home with a letter explaining to parents what their purpose is and what to do with them

2) use them in lessons as dictionaries, read them together, practise pronunciation of higher level vocab, refer to them frequently

3) base home learning tasks on them - if we start home learning (this has stopped this year due to covid and wellbeing) - possibly developing children's metacognitive strategies for learning the material (ie create a mnemonic, mindmap, extend), spelling activities and reading comprehension. The better they know the knowledge organiser, the more they will remember it. 

4) use them at least once for a retrieval activity (possibly in chunks?) where they still have access to the full text - before then also using them as summative assessment.

Throughout this half term I will be talking to the children about how they are using them and what they find useful about them. Having two parent governors of children in my class means I could also ask for 'parent voice'. At the moment this is still very much trial and error, it's my aim to have it nailed to a fine art by next year. 

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