“So … what can you tell me about osmosis?” the head of science asks Year 10, looking at them expectantly.

Before lockdown, these middle-set students knew this topic inside and out - and that was without the revision exercises the school has been setting remotely. But now, this question is met with nothing but blank stares. Sighing quietly, the head of science turns back to the board. It seems that this is yet another area she is going to have to go over again. Three weeks into their return to school, Year 10 still need help recalling what they learned before school closures.

This scene will be familiar to many teachers who are struggling to overcome the learning gap created by lost classroom time. Research by the Education Endowment Foundation suggests that we have lost a decade’s worth of progress in closing the attainment gap as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

This gap in learning presents a challenge for teachers but an even bigger issue for subject leaders, who must now take responsibility for planning how their department can take a joined-up approach to helping students catch up on what they have missed.

However, this situation also presents subject leads with an opportunity. Rather than just thinking about what we need to teach
so that students catch up, we have a chance to really focus our curriculum planning on how we teach. 

For me, this meant turning to research. Research evidence can’t solve all our problems in education, but it can give us “best bets” and new lenses through which to look at what we are offering our students. Here are the seven distinctions, drawn from research, that our subject leaders have found helpful and may be useful for others when thinking about planning, sequencing and delivering your curriculum to fill in the gaps, and over the coming year.

1. Working memory versus long-term memory

For a long time, education has lacked a “standard model” of learning. More recently, however, cognitive load theory has provided us with a model of mind that explains and predicts how information is stored, processed and retrieved from long-term memory.

Each of us has an extremely limited working memory - the site of our awareness and thinking. New knowledge is encoded into schemata in long-term memory, which can be retrieved (brought back to mind) to help support working memory.

It is necessary to bear this in mind when planning curriculum. We need to make sure that we are introducing new information in small chunks and ensuring that information is regularly, actively retrieved.

2. Substantive versus disciplinary knowledge

Each subject is a discipline. As such, subjects have a “substance” - a core body, or canon, of established facts. An expert of a subject has mastered this knowledge, internalising it in their mind.

Alongside this, however, is disciplinary knowledge. This describes the process that must be undertaken for scholars to arrive at an understanding of the substance of a subject. Furthermore, it provides the means and methods that can be used to establish the certainty of this knowledge, and how we would go about challenging it, or creating new knowledge. It is paramount to plan to teach pupils both the substantive and disciplinary knowledge alongside one another, as two intertwined threads.

3. Explicit instruction versus discovery learning

Pedagogical approaches can broadly be categorised into two “camps”. On the one hand, we have explicit instruction - the “sage on the stage” carefully instructing and transmitting the knowledge and skills of their subject. In the other camp, we have more discovery-led approaches, which promote activities that allow pupils to construct knowledge for themselves.

Although the latter are often popular choices in the classroom, and have up until recently been favoured by Ofsted and university departments, we now have good evidence that novices - your pupils - learn far better with an explicit-instruction approach.

This means that although there is certainly space for drama activities in your curriculum planning, these should be balanced by plenty of explicit instruction.

4. Learning versus performance

We never see learning. We can only ever infer it. Learning requires relatively permanent changes in long-term memory; we would have to look into a crystal ball to see if it had occurred.

This means that what we observe in the classroom is not really learning. So what is it? What we are seeing is “performance”: short-term fluctuations in behaviour and knowledge.

Counterintuitively, there is now good evidence that inhibiting short-term performance can actually strengthen long-term learning. Spacing out practice and interleaving related concepts are two good examples of approaches that we can use in subject planning to make sure we are prioritising learning over performance.

5. Core versus hinterland

Every topic we teach includes some core knowledge: the facts that you hope children will retain over months or even years. We can (and should) list these out when we are planning our curriculum, to be sure of what every child needs to know.

But this alone is a reductive approach to curriculum planning, and one that betrays the joy and integrity of our subjects.

We should, therefore, make sure that we introduce new core knowledge within the context of the “hinterland”: the aspects of a subject that aren’t strictly necessary but enhance the meaning of the core facts. An example of this might be hearing some of the personal stories behind the facts of the D-Day landings.

6. Flexible versus inflexible knowledge

We all want pupils to be able to transfer and apply their learning in novel contexts. This might be described as “flexible” knowledge - the goal of teaching. The opposite of this, perhaps, is “inflexible” knowledge: rote-learned facts that pupils regurgitate without truly understanding them.

However, it is not possible to leap-frog over inflexible learning straight to flexible learning. Rote-learned facts are stepping stones, which pupils use to gradually apply their knowledge in new contexts. It pays, then, to consider what inflexible learning it is necessary to drill pupils in, and make sure that this is built into your curriculum.

7. Diversive versus epistemic curiosity

There is no greater feeling than when a pupil’s passion for a subject or topic ignites. Curiosity is truly something to be treasured and pursued in our classrooms. But there are different kinds of curiosity. There is the fleeting, distracting, quick-rush of being fascinated by something, like a sparkler on bonfire night. This is bright, intense, but quickly extinguished. Then, there is the much deeper, ongoing interest in a topic, which burns slowly and burns for a long time. We might call these “diversive” and “epistemic” curiosity.

Both have their place, and we should consider how we can foster each as we are planning how and what we teach through our subjects.

Jon Hutchinson is an assistant headteacher in charge of primary curriculum and assessment at Reach Academy Feltham, in south-west London. He also teaches A-level religious studies at Reach, and is a visiting fellow for Ambition Institute.

This article originally appeared in the 3 July 2020 issue under the headline “The magnificent seven: how subject leads can come out all guns blazing”