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Kick-starting the virtuous cycle of high-quality centralised resources

The day of my university graduation was also the day I learned that I had a place on a PGCE course. My other half, who did not know my parents very well, sat down with them for a coffee while I got my robes fitted. “Are you ready?” – My mother, a teacher who at that point had around 35 years of teaching under her belt. “…For what?” – My other half “This is going to be the hardest two years of Becky’s life. You’re going to need to support her and you’re not going to see much of her until she’s at least out of her NQT.” When I met up with my cheering session after the ceremony, he looked paler than I did. It’s now been eight years since that fateful conversation and my other half has more than stepped up to the challenge; he’s cooked dinners, ironed shirts, cut out lettering, dropped off forgotten books, made banana bread for the team, prepared an ungodly amount of chicken for ‘Humanities Fajitas’, and he can even tell you what TLAC stands for. Most importantly, he has always g
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The Battle of the Knowledge Organisers with metacognition.org.uk

The world of Knowledge Organisers is often a dichotomous one. Are you team ‘narrative’, or team ‘grid’? In this blog, Becky Sayers and Nathan Burns explore the purpose of both types, as well as their respective advantages, disadvantages and applicability across subjects. So place your bets, as the fight is about to start…!   Becky Sayers writes about the definition, purpose, advantages and disadvantages of the ‘narrative’   Knowledge Organiser. The ‘Narrative’ Knowledge Organiser Why do we use Knowledge Organisers? As a faculty, we have been using Knowledge Organisers for around seven or eight years. If I’m honest, the original reason I used them is because I was told to do so by a faculty leader in whom I had immense trust. I did not understand their overall purpose and, as a result, the pages I produced were fairly poor quality. However, over the years we have thought carefully as a team about their purpose and, as a result, the Knowledge Organisers we have produced as a te
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“What was your second sentence again?”: silver bullets, cargo cults, and poor proxies of learning

Earlier in the year, I wrote a piece for the TES about these monstrosities: progress arrows. I used these bad boys in the first two years of my teacher career. The idea was that if pupils could tick the boxes, they had met the criteria for the lesson, made progress, and proved that I was an amazing teacher. The reality was that pupils would tick them to make me (or themselves) feel good with absolutely no actual evidence to prove that they had made any progress. They were nothing more than transparent attempts to please the invisible Ofsted inspector. Thankfully, progress arrows are a thing of the past. After all, it’s been 7 years. I am now a well-respected and experienced teacher and head of faculty and with this experience comes wise decisions. Surely I wouldn’t make the same mistake again? Alas… The Problem: Pupils were finding it difficult to retain knowledge in our subject. We were giving carefully thought out and well-planned explanations, but frankly there
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What are Knowledge Organisers? The Narrative and Grid Styles.

Knowledge organisers have been a part of my faculty’s approach to homework and the curriculum for roughly 5 years. During that time I have thought at length about what makes a good knowledge organiser. However, that also raised a fundamental question about what knowledge organisers actually are. Looking at other schools’ approaches and research on Twitter seems to suggest that there are two main styles, the narrative style and the grid style. The Grid Style: The grid format focuses on the clear presentation of facts, whether they are keywords, dates, or key individuals. They act as a method of directly reinforcing facts which pupils have already been taught in lessons. They are not presented in prose or a narrative, but rather than as a table in a “term: definition” format. Pupils often ‘quiz’ with these knowledge organisers with a ‘look, cover, say, write, check’ process, replicating the knowledge organiser, or by asking people to ask them the key definitions of different term
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Improving the tapestry: how I write knowledge organisers 2.0

It's been a few years since I wrote my last blog on knowledge organisers and I felt it was time for an update. I tend to update and tweak my knowledge organisers every year. However, seeing how much my style has actually changed over the last three years, a bit of reading about cognitive load, and some fantastic advice from Oliver Caviglioli have convinced me that it might be time for an update. So, here it is; my updated walk through of how I write knowledge organisers: 1.        Define your schema and sequence. Knowledge organisers should only contain the information which we expect your pupils to memorise and, rather than being an additional ‘bolt on’, they should be a true reflection and reinforcement of what is taught by all teachers within a team. As a result, I believe that planning lesson sequences and the key content of the lessons within a unit is vital before I even think about the knowledge organiser. In the past, where units and lessons have n
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Horses for courses but knowledge is still key

Last term I had the fantastic opportunity to visit a school which gets exemplary results in order to see what I could learn from them and what I could take to my department. I saw a school of pupils who were aspirational. I saw pupils who loved their lessons. I saw pupils who were willing to justify their opinions and cogently yet respectfully challenge the opinions of others. However, I also saw a number of practices which my academic reading had led me away from and which my department has actively moved away from in the last five years. This was a conundrum; I had to been sent to learn about this school’s practices because they are successful. Yet, some of their practices were the exact ones I’d be advised to avoid. However, on closer inspection, I saw the foundation which supported the excellence I saw in lessons; every pupil I saw was exceptionally knowledgeable. In a history lesson (their first on the Cold War), I saw pupils guess “Yeltsin” and “Putin” when presented wi
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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, langu
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