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Reasons why your Knowledge Organisers may not be working: 4 Questions to ask


It’s no secret that I’m a big advocate of knowledge organisers. However, over the last few months I have a read a number of blogs by influential edu…tweeters(?) who, taken on their title alone, appear to criticise their use. However, on closer inspection, I complete agree with the common line of argument from almost all of them: knowledge organisers themselves are not a bad thing per say, so long as they are written and implemented properly; fail to do so, and they become a time-consuming, workload-expanding bolt on or fad with very little impact.

If knowledge organisers aren’t working for you, ask yourself the following questions:

Why are you using them?
Roughly 4 years-experience of knowledge organisers within my current school has shown us that the format, content and use of knowledge organisers will and should differ vastly from department to department: while history has knowledge organisers which focus on the narrative and key events within a particular period, languages has developed “knowledge grids” in KS3, which focus on key phrases and sentences for pupils to memorise which can then later be manipulated. Practical subjects, such as music, have relatively short knowledge organisers which focus on memorising key terms and symbols.

Knowledge organisers should be developed over time by individual departments, giving them sufficient time to consider what a knowledge organiser should look like for them and to allow them to be written properly.

How are you using them?
When I first used knowledge organisers, I gave every child a copy and gave them the homework task of “learn about *topic* using your knowledge organiser. You will be quizzed on it next lesson.” This did not go well: A few pupils read the knowledge organisers fastidiously and were able to easily commit the content to memory with their own, independent work. Most pupils read the knowledge organiser, did nothing else with it, and, as a result, learned very little (and didn’t know why). Their lack of success in their starter quizzes at the beginning of the lesson appeared to demotivate many and, over time, engagement with knowledge organisers decreased.

We now give every child a set of questions about each (numbered) section of the knowledge organiser which they answer at home and we check in class. These sets of questions and answers then become retrieval practice which is also set as a homework task. This has proven much more effective.
Research shows us that novices often cannot differentiate between activities which they find easy and activities which are effective. If pupils are given the knowledge organiser with little instruction other than to “learn” it, the majority will opt for ineffective methods or will not bother at all. This new approach appears to work because it not only forces pupils to closely read knowledge organiser, but it is based around methods which have been proven to be effective, such as retrieval practice.

How were they written?
I regularly post up pages from my knowledge organisers onto my twitter and my Dropbox has a number of examples of knowledge organisers which I have written. This may be something which I should stop doing…

I have had the “revision guides/textbooks vs. knowledge organisers” discussions with many people and my argument always comes down to this: if a textbook was completely in line with the specification, how/what I teach, and principles of cognitive science (and if every single child had a copy which they could take home and keep), I would be more than happy to use them instead of knowledge organisers. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a textbook or revision guide which meets these lofty standards.

Following on from this argument, I believe that knowledge organisers are most effective when they are an integrated part of a topic, rather than being a bolt on about the same topic which has been downloaded from the TES. This approach inevitably caused an initial increase in workload. However, as a department, we now find that knowledge organisers are now being tweaked year on year, rather than having to be rewritten (or redownloaded) annually.

When were they written?
A friend of mine told me that, at their previous school, SLT decided that knowledge organisers were a good thing and so should be written for every subject within or two or three week deadline in the middle of a school year. Equally, when I first started writing knowledge organisers I produced them on a lesson by lesson basis according to what I was planning to teach for that particular lesson. Both of these approaches are fundamentally flawed.

Knowledge organisers are not and should not be an easy thing to write; significant time should be ensuring that they are carefully sequenced, presenting the information in the clearest and most succinct way possible and deciding both what should be left in and (arguably more importantly) what can be left out. This can only be achieved if knowledge organisers are written when the unit is being planned (as Ben Newmark suggests, after the schema and scheme of work has been defined) and well before it is taught, to allow sufficient time for it to be organised, planned, written and revised.

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