Ramblings on a Knowledge-led approach

Picture the scene: It’s 2009. A teacher in Year 4 is trying to tie the content from different subjects together under one theme. They want it to engage and excite the children. They want the children to look back and remember this as a highlight of their time in Year 4, so they develop a Maria Kart theme.

The children start by playing the game on the Wii, using that experience as a way in as well to generate vocabulary. They create collages on Photoshop of the characters and settings from the game. They then design a theme park where they would create a map of the park, looking at coordinates and contours. Finally, they would use the vocabulary generated and their experiences to create a fantasy narrative based on Bowser’s Castle.

As I’m sure you’ve guessed, that teacher was me. You can even read more about it here.

The children really did remember that time with fondness (they got to play Mario Kart — who wouldn’t?!) and they were VERY engaged. I’d never seen a boy heavy class want to write as much as they did then.

Thing is. Looking back with hindsight, they didn’t learn that much. Certainly not for the amount of learning time that was exchanged.

In 2015, I was at the BESA Publishers Conference. You can read my scathing criticism here. But my thinking then began to shift and I state that I was wrong here.

Why all this seeming preamble before I write anything actually new in this post? Hopefully to show that what is coming shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Views can change. Mine have. Significantly. I’m going to tread my toe in the Trad v Prog debate. The knowledge v skills debate. Politics v Educators debate. It’s going to get messy.

Let’s start by saying this about Mr Gibb. You don’t survive seemingly countless Education Ministers by accident. He has a clear goal and one that is informed by research (a theme that will raise its head several times in this post). Its easy to dismiss (any) Conservatives as out of touch, stuck hankering after a long disappeared period of time, with a privalleged academic driven background that likely includes grammar schooling if not boarding school. Mr Gibb has the Grammar background. I should know, we went to the same school (Maidstone Grammar School). But don’t hold this against either of us.

A bit of background on me. I’m not overly academic. At school I loved sport, computing, a bit of English Lit on the side. Maths scared me silly, I did single Science (a regret), stopped Geography at 13 and History bored me. I got 3 A Levels in English Lit, Computing and Sociology but none higher than a C. I did always aim at going to University and come from the generation that expected to walk into a job after it, only to find out that employers wanted workplace experience and a vocational degree, not a 2:1 in Sociology and Social Psychology.

I’m hopefully illustrating that appearances can be deceiving and you have to go beyond your own views, questioning yourself and everything around you, which is what I have started to do in placing research at the heart of the decisions I make regarding pedagogy and the curriculum.

Furthermore, I’ve never voted Conservative. I can’t forsee a time I ever will (particularly in its current direction). My mum has basically been bed bound for a number of years. She was a teacher of textiles and home economics before that. My dad was a probation officer. My wife is a civil servant. These are not the conditions to find yourself ‘leaning right’ after a decade of cuts to public services without at least inflation related wage increases.

I’ve voted on every election, general, local and EU since I was able and on all but one occasion have voted Lib Dem.

I now believe in a Knowledge-led approach to the curriculum. Mr Gibb has got me. In Twitter vernacular, that makes me a Trad and potentially a Conservative. Supposedly someone who wants to return to a traditional, academic schooling. And this is where the debate usually starts to get a little nasty as the connotations are that we have moved passed that period in time for the better. I am certainly not suggesting we should all start wearing caps, queue for a quiant tuckshop and getting ready for our knuckles to be rapped after failing to answer a question in front of the whole class.

What I am suggesting is that the currently available research says that we further inhibit disadvantaged children’s life prospects by not sharing key knowledge that holds high cultural capital. I taught a pupil premium boy in year 3 who’s life goal was to be an ice cream van seller. Fair play, he likes ice cream, who doesn’t? But could he have more life choices if he had increased knowledge that enabled him to reach closer to his academic potential? Undoubtedly. I’m counting academic potential as the potential in any subject here, Design Technology, History, Computing, Art. In other words, a knowledge led approach helps all children to reach their academic potential. Social justice.

This goes far beyond Mr Gibb, who has been hugely influenced by E.D.Hirsch. I’ve created a series of images that act as the rabbit hole to my own Alice In Wonderland explanation of the curriculum here (see there was a bit of knowledge that holds fairly high cultural capital, referenced in many awesome films such as The Matrix).

Suffice to say, the entire movement of cognitive science is telling us the same thing.

Knowledge matters. If you want children to think critically, they need to know stuff to think critically about. Not just any stuff. Well chosen stuff that is decided on outside the remit of individual teachers. Ideally outside individual schools. See Dylan Wiliam for more on this. Just a decade of joined up thinking required.

Back to the knowledge vs skills debate. I think we need to be careful with what we see as ‘skills’. I think many teachers refer to a skill when actually they are talking about procedural knowledge (riding a bike, writing a sentence, drawing a straight line freehand). It only gets murky when you’re trying to categorise things like ‘interrogating sources of evidence’. However rather than becoming overly fixated on eradicating the word ‘skill’ from our teaching, what is far more important is the idea that the vast majority of ‘skills’ require a significant amount of knowledge as a precursor before they are able to reach optimum effectiveness. Taking interrogating sources of evidence as an example, what is going to make children better at doing that out of:

1. Showing them a source of evidence and asking the children to share what they think about it
2. Showing them a source of evidence and explaining to them what we know about it

I would argue that 1 would lead to random contributions as children, unguided, guess as they try and make sense of the source. I would also argue that 2 is generally better, due to the increasing knowledge but it is still less than optimal.

I would also argue the following:

3. Showing them a source of evidence asking children what they KNOW about it. Focus they can link it to their existing schema (each individual’s own interrelated understanding of knowledge). Then directly tell the children where they are right, wrong and share the additional new knowledge required to understand that source of evidence better alongside this.

If this is repeated with each source of evidence, children’s schema become more developed, changing as the teacher explains each new source and how it relates to other sources and other knowledge learnt. Now here’s the thing. There has been very little time given over to what you might call ‘we are learning how to interrogate sources of evidence’. But will children become better at doing it? I would strongly argue, yes. You could apply the above to the reading focused ‘skill’ of inference. There is a growing body of work to say that beyond a few well chosen lessons, you are much better off focusing on expanding children’s contextual background knowledge alongside their vocabulary. Knowledge it seems, really is king. But only because it serves as the tangeble component in creating an increasingly well developed schema. Alongside knowledge is the other crucial aspect… understanding.

Often people think of a knowledge led or rich approach as only interested in individual disparate units of knowledge: dates, number facts, spelling etc. In reality, yes these are crucial, as they enable schemas to be built, however it is how children understand the interrelated nature of this knowledge that is the true king here.

Schema development by constantly refining understanding of existing knowledge is the core of a knowledge led approach. Perhaps it should be called a schema driven approach instead.

The acquisition of new knowledge is clearly crucial as well, but without being able to interpret, place and refine where that knowledge fits in our existing schema, it is pretty much redundant and soon forgotten for good.

This, I believe, is what often gets missed in Trads v Progs debates. I’m going to generalise here so bear with… Trads get annoyed because they see the Progs without significant research to back up their opinions. They get exasperated at knowing our job is to teach children stuff but see teachers ‘making choices’ to ignore swathes of cognitive science research showing how we best do this, hating a supposed idiology of ‘facts, silence and face the front’ teaching.

Progs get annoyed as they see Trads as cold, not putting children’s needs first, seeing them as vessels for knowledge rather than active in their own learning. They site their own body of constructivist research and become exasperated at why trads seemingly pick and choose which research to believe.

I’ve been on both sides of this. I really have — you can see that from the blogs I reference at the start. I’m not trying to split the 2 approaches further into sides, in fact, there is quite a lot of cross over — for example Vygotsky’s ‘more knowledeable other’ fits very well with cognitivism and going the other way, Guidance Fading the Expertise Reversal effects from Cognitive Load Theory certainly suggests a place for problem solving through potential child-led learning.

So with a background in Sociology and Social Psychology, which sits far more neatly with constructivist views than cognitivists, why am I personally convinced a knowledge-led curriculum is the way to go?

Simply the overwhelming body of evidence in Cognitive Science.

Couple this with a Primary National Curriculum that in core subjects is very much aligned to knowledge-led pedagogy and an accountability system where Ofsted are now going to look at the intent and implementation across the whole curriculum and you have a convergence of all, around a cognitive science based, knowledge-led approach.

I could at this point reason how a knowledge led curriculum is linked to engagement, memory and behaviour. I’ll just give one example (also stolen from someone else, I can’t remember where though) — you start watching a documentary you have little to no interest in. If the program is half decent at all, by the end you’ll have enjoyed quite a lot, remembered a fair amount and be quite likely to want to find out more. Knowledge begets knowledge (Hirsch) and memory is the residue of thought (Willingham).

As the post title suggests, I don’t have any particular point to make other than sharing what’s in my own head. It’s been written on a phone, mainly whilst on a train. I hope it breaks down barriers rather than raises them further.