Adam Robbins Education

I’m a fan of the current curriculums available in England. Compared to previous science curricula they are well focused and I think the lack of coursework and focus on key declarative and procedural knowledge is good. I think my students leave yr11 with more flexible and deep knowledge than previously and I notice this when I teach them in yr12+13. 

The curriculums have one huge problem. They are flipping huge!

I’ve heard people call maths ‘fat maths’ and so I think this is probably a big issue in most GCSE subjects including science.

Given this issue schools have turned to a number of solutions, from co-opting tutor time, to timetabling extra lessons after school, to reducing the time of some subjects to increase the time in ‘the core’. 

This year time has been incredibly tight for me with my yr 11 top set. So I have had to be judicious with how it is used. I want to share two strategies I have found useful in a hope that it helps others in the same position.

1. Checking prior knowledge. 

The cognitive case for checking prior knowledge is pretty strong. The idea that new knowledge is learnt best when the existing knowledge is activated is well established. When I talk to teachers about this their biggest reservation though is it is removing time from lessons they cannot spare. So I wanted to explore this a little. I have found that by checking the prior knowledge of my students it has allowed me to greatly accelerate the progression through the curriculum. I think this has happened due to two main reasons. Firstly if I can prove to myself that students can already do something then I can just skip that part of the lesson and move on. I don’t see teachers willing to do this very often, the reason I will explain when discussing strategy 2. Secondly, if I find what parts they can’t do then by starting my explanation there I make sure there are fewer gaps in their knowledge, allowing for more efficient learning. This in turn makes independent practice more valuable. So when I call back to this information in a subsequent lesson it is well embedded and saves me from having to re-teach. 

An example of this would be this week when I began teaching forces. I started by looking at the components of the first few sections on forces, resultant forces, weight calculations and resolving forces. I asked a series of miniwhiteboard questions to check students’ understanding of these issues. They were not good at identifying forces so we re-capped them and rechecked their understanding and did a small block of practice. But they were good at calculating mass and weight and resultant force. So we just skipped that and went straight on to resolving forces using scale drawings. This saved me about 60-90 mins of curriculum time I think. 

2. Having flexible resources.

The ability to skip ahead based on instantaneous data, to adjust the speed of progression according to the audience is only possible if you have resources that support this. I am lucky that my resources are not organised in ‘lessons’. I can look at  a topic holistically and allocate the time needed for my audience and be responsive. This doesn’t have to be a particular format. It could be a booklet like I use or powerpoint etc.. In fact in Springboard KS3 science we use powerpoint for each topic. It is not the format but the ability to speed up and slow down. In our booklets I get the students to write “TOO EASY” next to the topic if we can skip it. The questions will still be useful for extra work and revision at a later date. This also means I never have dead time that I fill with unnecessary practice or busy work (Like those stretch questions people write that are just chosen because they are open ended to keep the most able busy). Depending on how fluent the students are in the check for understanding I can tailor the volume of practice they do and when they finish, they can go back to previous topics for some interleaving while others finish. The other day the class finished with 10 mins to go. So we did a brief explanation of work done and a 5 min whiteboard quiz. This meant that the following lesson I could just quickly check that and jump straight into the practice. 

So this year I have found that by being rigorous with my prior knowledge checks I have managed to reduce the curriculum crunch. I hope you find this useful.

What about my lower ability students?

If you think this is only useful for the more able students that have prior knowledge then I kind of agree. However checking prior knowledge is of value to less able students as well because it increases the chance of effective learning. Now that might feel like it slows the progression down and I think that is correct. However I would say that by focusing on the missing prior knowledge and then extending into the foundational GCSE ideas we provide the students with a better chance of learning important concepts than just blindly progressing through the course. After all the students’ grades will not be awarded by what has been delivered by the teacher, but by what they have remembered. But this might be a topic for another post in the new year if people want me to elaborate.