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  • Support for early career teachers
  • Education Development Trust
  • Year 2: Second half-term: revisiting the importance of subject and curriculum knowledge
    • Spring week 5

    Mentor materials

    Supporting pupils to apply their knowledge and skills to other contexts

    Intended outcomes

    The intended outcomes of this topic are for Early Career Teachers to:

    Learn how to help pupils apply knowledge and skills to other contexts, by:

    • Ensuring pupils have relevant domain-specific knowledge, especially when being asked to think critically within a subject
    • Interleaving concrete and abstract examples, slowly withdrawing concrete examples and drawing attention to the underlying structure of problems.

    Activities

    Reflecting on learning (10 minutes)

    In the last topic, the mentor and ECT explored two statements from the ECF:

    Develop fluency, by:

    • Providing tasks that support pupils to learn key ideas securely (e.g. quizzing pupils so they develop fluency with times tables)
    • Using retrieval and spaced practice to build automatic recall of key knowledge.

    Review and recap each of these statements.

    Pose the question: How have you used the ideas from the last topic in your teaching this week?

    Ensure pupils have relevant domain-specific knowledge before being asked to think critically within a subject (15 minutes)

    Guidance to mentors:

    Remind ECTs that they already considered Statement 3.8 in their first year: Pupils are likely to struggle to transfer what has been learned in one discipline to a new or unfamiliar context.

    Domain specific knowledge refers to the necessary content knowledge for a particular topic. Without significant domain-specific knowledge, it is not possible for pupils to apply reasoning. For example, if a pupil does not know the sequence of events in World War 2, then there would be little point in asking them to form an argument as to whether the Allies did enough to prevent Hitler soon enough.

    Together, read Handout 10.2, an excerpt adapted from Sweller, J., van Merrienboer, J. J. G. & Paas, F. G. W. C. (1998) Cognitive Architecture and Instructional Design. Educational Psychology Review, 10(3), 251–296. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022193728205/.

    Pose the questions:

    1. What do you understand by ‘domain-specific knowledge?’
    2. Why do pupils need to develop domain-specific knowledge before being asked to think critically?
    3. Can you give an example from your subject area?

    Interleave concrete and abstract examples (30 minutes)

    Guidance to mentors:

    Interleaving is a process where pupils mix multiple subjects or topics while studying. Blocked practice is learning each topic in a block before moving on.

    The mentor and ECT will have already discussed the merits in using concrete examples to illustrate abstract concepts. Mixing concrete and abstract examples can support pupils to make sense of the underlying structures of problems. Concrete examples should be removed gradually.

    Listen to the short podcast of a teacher talking about interleaving.

    Interleaving is a strategy that requires learners to switch between concepts when studying or practising material. Switching between ideas can make initial learning more challenging, but leads to enhanced long-term learning when compared to ‘blocking’ learning. Research suggests that when we are introducing a concept to pupils, it can be useful to mix up closely related examples instead of using many examples of the same concept. This helps pupils to distinguish between similar concepts, which they may otherwise muddle.

    Review the following example with the ECT: Imagine that we wanted to teach students to be able to identify different kinds of clouds.

    Pose the question: Would it be better for students to see those clouds side by side, or to look at one cloud at a time? Answer: It would be better to see them side by side so that they are able to distinguish the subtle differences between them.

    Pose the questions:

    1. What does this tell us about interleaving?
    2. How might you use interleaving in your subject?

    Possible answers:

    • Posing sets of mixed questions that require pupils to switch between different categories and concepts.
    • Practising skills from different topics.
    • Integrating skills within a task, for example as part of a written composition.
    • An activity that requires pupils to retrieve information from different topics e.g. mixing up vocabulary, spellings or core content knowledge.

    Moving to action

    Agree with your ECT what they will do as a result of today’s topic.