Teaching challenge

Ms Andrews is increasingly confident in managing behaviour and motivating students to participate in lessons. This gives her more time to think about lessons. She wants to ensure she is making the best use of the limited time she has with pupils: how can her planning best ensure pupils learn?

Key idea

Effective teaching is planned backwards, breaking down and communicating ambitious learning goals set out in the curriculum.

Evidence summary

Basing learning on the curriculum

Ms Andrews’ planning begins with the curriculum. The curriculum sets out the learning to which all pupils are entitled (Wiliam, 2016). It determines the ideas pupils should encounter and the knowledge and skills they should acquire (Wiliam, 2018). This guides teachers to teach the most important knowledge, skills and values effectively. For example, a carefully designed maths curriculum (alongside effective teaching methods) appears to increase pupil learning (Jerrim & Vignoles, 2016).

Most schools base their curriculum on the national curriculum, with adaptations to suit pupils’ needs and the school’s vision. Individual teachers are not responsible for setting the curriculum: what they do, which no curriculum designer can do, is make the curriculum comprehensible. They do this by connecting what pupils are to learn with their existing knowledge and experience (Young et al, 2014). Ms Andrews’ success relies on secure knowledge of the curriculum and her pupils in order to motivate and teach them effectively.

What teachers need to know about what they teach

A challenge intrinsic to teaching is making complicated ideas in the curriculum comprehensible to pupils (Kennedy, 2015). In doing this, Ms Andrews must balance making ideas simple enough to understand, whilst remaining meaningful, and true to the curriculum. Ms Andrews’ skill in doing this rests on her developing understanding of the knowledge, skills and values she teaches. As well as being guided by the school curriculum, she can use colleagues and shared resources to build this knowledge. When she does so, to translate curriculum goals into effective learning experiences, Ms Andrews needs to know:

The topic: What a non-specialist, but well-informed adult might know about it.
Ways to introduce and sequence ideas: In what order to introduce key ideas, and how best to explain them.
Where pupils will struggle and what they might get wrong: Allowing her to anticipate and overcome pupils’ misunderstandings.
Potential links: How the current topic connects to past and future topics (Ball, Thames & Phelps, 2008).

Ms Andrews needs more than a knowledge of the topic: she needs to know how students learn it and how to make it comprehensible to them.

Breaking learning down

This knowledge — of curricular goals and how pupils learn them – allows Ms Andrews to plan lessons which work towards her goals in logical, carefully-pitched steps. Ms Andrews is aware of the need to break complicated ideas down to make them comprehensible: she designs tasks so that they do not provide too much new or complicated information at once.

However, she recognises a broader point about breaking learning down when she plans lessons which work towards learning goals. Rather than designing isolated tasks and fitting them into a lesson, she seeks to link tasks to form a sequence of meaningful steps towards learning goals across multiple lessons. To succeed she needs to make explicit links to what has been previously studied and learned as she goes. For example, when she introduces a new idea with concrete examples and highlights the underlying principles and offers practice, each activity is a step towards achieving the learning goal, building on previous study.

This approach allows her to organise her lessons around a narrative structure of steps towards understanding and achieving a learning goal: this approach is both more comprehensible and more memorable for pupils (Willingham, 2009, pp.66-9).

Nuances and caveats

While schools establish what they will teach informed by the National Curriculum, teachers are always doing curricular thinking, as they find new and better ways to teach the school’s curriculum. Their thinking then informs future revisions of the curriculum. Gaining this knowledge of how pupils learn a subject takes time. A new teacher would not be expected to achieve this depth immediately: the usefulness of these categories is in knowing what to think about in planning, and what to ask colleagues. High-quality curricular resources may also embody these forms of knowledge, for example textbooks or colleagues’ shared resources aligned to the school curriculum.

Key takeaways

Ms Andrews can begin to make a difference to pupils by:

planning backwards from specific, ambitious goals for knowledge, skills and values: the learning goals set out in the curriculum
using her knowledge of the subject and topic and how pupils learn it to break big goals into smaller, more manageable ones and to sequence these goals
organising the lesson into a sequence of meaningful steps towards her learning

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