Variety is the spice of life, so they say. As aphorisms go, there are certainly worse sayings. There’s no denying that one of the things that drew me to primary teaching was the variety provided by a timetable of multiple subjects as opposed to the potential monotony of just one. Of course, secondary colleagues would no doubt say that there’s plenty of variety to be found within their subjects and different classes, and so the saying holds its worth again.

As a new teacher, I saw my role partly as providing the spice of variety to my pupils to ensure that they were engaged and motivated to tackle the content I wanted to share with them. In fact, scratch that - it wasn’t just as a new teacher at all. I repeatedly strove, throughout my career as a classroom teacher, to find new and innovative ways to present content, for children to engage with it and for them to record and present the outcomes.

We didn’t just read about the contenders to the throne in 1066; I made a video in the style of X Factor to present them. When it came to writing newspapers, rather than setting out the success criteria clearly for pupils on the working wall as normal, we had them arrive by “email from the editor”. I didn’t want my class just to answer questions about the death of Thomas Becket: much better to present the story as a TV news report.

Teaching isn’t all about the ‘wow’ factor

No doubt many of these things made the days more enjoyable for me, and maybe for some of the children in my class, too. (Although I can’t help but notice that schools very quickly set themselves a threshold for “excitement”: if every topic has a “wow” start, that soon becomes such an expectation that it ceases to wow anyone.)

The trouble is, how effective were they for helping my classes to really learn the content of what we were covering? No doubt many children will remember snippets of what we did. One might remember “interviewing” a king in the stairwell (the quietest place in the school to film!). A couple will recall their roles as anchorman and anchorwoman of our hastily compiled skit. But how many will recall which king was involved, or when? Or even what happened at all?

One of the myriad challenges of teaching and learning is striking the balance between variety and consistency. I’ve written before about the foolishness of too much consistency, but there is danger in too much variety, too. If every day and every lesson present a different approach to varied content, then the risk is that the variety becomes the focus rather than the tool.

A little repetition does you good when it comes to learning.  That’s not to say that every day should be the same - far from it - but it helps to have systems and structures that are familiar. Reducing the need to think about things that are not the main goal can only help children to focus on the task at hand.

Success criteria are useful guidance for pupils, and presenting them in the same format for each task helps children to think about the criteria rather than the format. Using a shared reading approach to introducing new content, followed by 10 multiple-choice questions, might seem repetitive to you, who knows the content, but for children meeting it for the first time, that consistency allows them to focus on the learning rather than the presentation.

And every now and then, break free and make a video or put on a show. Variety is the spice, for sure, but too much spice can make your eyes water.

Michael Tidd is headteacher at Medmerry Primary School in West Sussex. He tweets @MichaelT1979