Always Learning: Reflections from the PKC Team (Part 1)

By Emma Lennard

Almost two weeks ago now, (time truly does fly) I gathered with colleagues and friends to attend the marvellous ResearchED. What a way to start the school year! A whole day where we are free to embrace our inner edu-geek and to hear from some of the most interesting voices in Education. We can chat with researchers over pastries, drink tea next to long admired edu-authors and meet fellow teachers and learn from their wisdom and experience. Tom Bennett’s passion for finding out what works in education has grown into an international movement where teachers around the world are engaging with research, questioning classroom practice and challenging prevailing orthodoxies. ResearchEd is simply brilliant, long may it continue.

It’s always a challenging task to choose which sessions to attend, but I’ve been wanting to hear Mark Enser speak for a long time, so I grabbed a seat quickly before the room filled up. Mark is a geography teacher and author; his talk was on the subject of Powerful Knowledge. What follows is my takeaway from his talk, which was much more comprehensive and skilled than I could replicate, but I hope my reflections can be useful.

Powerful knowledge is a term that is often used by those of us working to create a knowledge-based curriculum. We are interested in the role of knowledge in the curriculum, what can it do for our pupils? When we say we want knowledge in the curriculum, which knowledge are we talking about? Importantly, what potential power does this knowledge give to our pupils?

Michael Young coined the term ‘powerful knowledge’ and explored the concept in his text ‘Knowledge and the Future School[1]’. In his session, Mark took us through an explanation of Michael Young’s Three Futures; a lens through which we can view approaches to curriculum. I’ve summarised these here, in what are probably overly simple terms, any errors in understanding are my own:

-Future 1 focuses on knowledge transmission and uncontested facts. The teacher is key- what they say must be learned without question.

-Future 2 focus on teachers as facilitators, reduces the role of knowledge, is more skills based and led by the child.

-Future 3 recognises the divisions caused by Future 2, how some children end up with more knowledge than others, often as a result of privileges such as social background. It proposes a third way, where our curriculum is designed around a struggle for truth. Future 3 has new ways of thinking about the substantive knowledge in our curriculum, vitally it asks; how was this knowledge created and why does that matter?

Through the three futures model we can really clarify our understanding of what we are trying to do with our curriculum work. We aren’t creating a Future 1 ‘pub quiz curriculum’ where we don’t care about understanding, just memorisation of facts and no one dare question us. We aren’t creating a Future 2 wholly flexible curriculum that is drained of substance and is left largely to chance. We are creating a curriculum that overflows with powerful knowledge where the ‘best’ knowledge has been carefully selected and sequenced. As Mark pointed out, the ‘best’ knowledge in our curriculum can and should be contested by us as professionals and by the independent thinkers we are educating, our pupils.

The PKC team always joke that we never want to take the word ‘draft’ from our curriculum documents, because as Ruth Ashbee says[1], ‘Curriculum work is never finished, it is never completed; it is a never-ending and essential activity at the core of teaching.’ In this way, the powerful knowledge in our curriculum must always be under the microscope; we must always be asking ourselves, is this the best? Is this the closest to the truth that our current disciplinary understanding can get? We must lift every corner of our curriculum and dust underneath it, scrutinise every nook and cranny to make sure that everything is there for a reason and is the best it can be.

Mark explained what powerful knowledge can give to those who possess it by reflecting on the work of Alaric Maude. Those who possess powerful knowledge can:

· Discover new ways of thinking; the world makes more sense to people who understand it

· Better explain the world, what it is like, what it has been like

· Think about alternative futures; how can I change the world?

· Think independently, engaging in debates about the world’s big questions

· Go beyond the limits of their personal experience

These could be a list of our hopes and dreams for our pupils, but more than that, here at the Knowledge Schools Trust we believe these abilities are a child’s right. Powerful knowledge is at the core of our mission as teachers. Although it may not feel like it sometimes, we are all changing the world and by teaching a knowledge-rich primary curriculum, we give our pupils the power to do the same.

After grabbing a quick tea, I headed next to Heather Fern from Ofsted’s talk about the recently published subject research reviews[2]. For us here at the Knowledge School Trust we have been eagerly awaiting the research reviews and we are thrilled that the inspectorate is conducting research. We have been reflecting on the question, ‘what works in primary education?’ since we opened our first Primary School in 2013. We want to make sure what we are doing aligns with the latest research in pedagogy, cognitive science and with thinking in the disciplines we teach. Heather took us through some of the thinking behind the reviews and explained that the purpose of the reviews is to provide clarity, reliability, and a shared understanding of quality education.

Heather touched upon some themes that are close to our hearts of the PKC team; closing knowledge gaps, strengthening schema, subject progression over time. The research reviews are essential reading for anyone interested in curriculum development. They look at different pedagogical approaches, assessment and whole school policies and review their impact on the quality of subjects in schools. We look forward to the forthcoming reviews as we continue to work out what works and how we can give our pupils the best possible education in all subject areas.

I sadly could only attend the morning of the conference, but do look out for forthcoming blogs from other members of our team. ResearchEd is a wonderful opportunity to reflect, learn, and network as together we find out what works.

 

Find out more about the Primary Knowledge Curriculum here: www.primaryknowledgecurriculum.org

 

[1] Knowledge and the Future School by Michael Young (Author), David Lambert (Author), Carolyn Roberts (Author),2014

[2] Ashbee, Ruth, Curriculum; Theory, Culture and Subject Specialisms, Routledge 2021

[3]https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/curriculum-research-reviews