In this conversation Mary Myatt and Karl McGrath discuss what it takes to design high quality learning materials, taking inspiration from William Morris: ‘We shouldn't have anything in our homes that we don't know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.’
Here is a transcript and some links to materials mentioned in the talk!
Clare Sealy on Adaptive Teaching: The Four Verbs Approach (blog)
Margaret Mulholland’s TES page (SEND & inclusion specialist at ASCL
Rachel Ball (former Assistant Principal, history teacher, T&L consultant)
Professor Lani Florian on Inclusive Pedagogy: A transformative approach to individual differences (Scottish Educational Review, 2015)
Books & Texts Referenced in the Conversation
On the Origin of Species (illustrated retelling) by Sabina Radeva
The Street Beneath My Feet by Charlotte Guillain & Yuval Zommer
A Pebble in My Pocket by Meredith Hooper
Out and About by Shirley Hughes
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud (Karl’s reference on comic design principles applied to task design)
Transcript
Karl: That seems to be a theme that sort of emerged from your work a lot. And one of the things that got me thinking was when we’re talking about design and education, and I think you talk passionately about quality and quality resources in education. And for me, I think the first question I would ask is we’re still having this conversation. So what do you think the sector is actually still missing or that we’re maybe not taking seriously enough when we think about quality and design?
Mary: Yeah, that’s such an interesting question, Karl, and I really welcome the invitation to join you for this. Thank you to Phil as well. You said just now about, you know, I share ideas with clarity, which is a great compliment. Thank you.
But the reason I do is because I think in very simple terms and I want to get abstract ideas made as concrete and accessible as possible for me. And then I just put them out into the world to see whether they resonate with others. That comes from a position of wanting clarity from my own point of view. To your question about intentional thought about the quality of the materials and the design of the materials that we offer our pupils. I think this is an underexplored avenue within current curriculum discourse. I think what’s happened with the sector over the last 10 years is that there’s been a much more heightened and sophisticated conversation about the quality of the knowledge and the content which is selected to offer our pupils. I think we’ve got pretty much to the right balance of between knowledge and skills, substantive and disciplinary knowledge, which are helpful to a certain degree, but we have much more awareness of what is valuable to be taught.
And, you know, when I talk with schools and school leaders, they say that they think, and I agree with them, that the overall planning is much more structured, quite a bit more coherent, and the topics and the units of learning are pretty much all in place. But what they then say to me, and I agree with them, is that what lands on children’s desks is often a bit dull.
So I think where this leads into your question about the quality of the resources, I don’t think there is a shared conversation at the moment, and I’m glad to be having this with you now, about what constitutes quality in terms of the resources that land on children’s desks. And I have a very simple metric that I use, and that is drawing on William Morris’s dictum that we shouldn’t have anything in our homes that we don’t know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. And this is not about taste, it’s not about making a judgment about whether this is high art or low art or high— This is about, is it good enough for the pupils in front of me? So is it useful? Is it useful for learning? Is it beautiful? Is it the best quality that we can have?
For two reasons. One is my children deserve the best. And I don’t think we ask ourselves before printing off a load of worksheets, is this the best I can offer my children? And it’s not a blame game. It’s just, I think we need to elevate the conversations around here. And then is it suitable for learning? Is it going to add value to learning? So those are the headlines of where I’m coming at this from.
Karl: I think it’s an interesting point. I was having a conversation this morning actually, or no, sorry, at lunchtime. And one of my colleagues had said, well, you’ve done some work around graphic design, so of course your resources will look a particular way. And it was interesting, we both had the same point that they don’t have to look a certain way in order to be high quality. And I think often we use the phrases like high quality resources, beautiful, usefulness. And I like the fact that you’ve paired useful and beautiful together. Obviously again, quote William Morris, but we’re not saying it has to look a certain way because again, some tasks can be overly decorative. And a lot of the work that we’re presenting children can be so decorative that it becomes confusing or almost cognitively overstimulating. Whereas the idea is that usefulness and my sort of, I sort of said, I don’t come at it from a graphic design point of view. Yes.
I did a wee bit of dabbling in graphic design and that maybe gives me an eye that maybe some people have, but we sort of talked about the fact that for me it’s about how children engage with work on the page or on the table or with their partner. And I’m constantly thinking about, well, how’s child A gonna engage with this task or this piece of work, but also how’s it gonna allow them to engage with child B or me or the whole room? And I think that’s—
I love that term useful and beautiful for that reason. It’s not about it has to look a certain way, although it does to a degree.
Yeah. And I mean, I think it’s interesting as well. You touched on the idea of what’s landing on children’s desks or printing things out. And I suppose as a sort of follow-up question, do you think there’s something we’re missing in terms of enabling teachers to produce higher quality resources or do we sort of stunt that process at any particular point? At what point do we allow teachers the freedom to develop them? Or do we give them enough to develop the resources of high quality? Do you think?
Mary: Yes, I’m just very mindful of workload. For me, it’s about selection of resources. I don’t think we should be creating very much from scratch unless it’s something that is particularly important and I can justify putting my time into it. What I think the sector needs, and it’s a leadership issue as far as I’m concerned, and there’s ownership on all of us as well, wherever we are in the sector, is just to refine our judgment about whether this is worthy of my children. So there’s plenty of stuff out there, but I can make some choices rather than just pulling down the first one that is going to do the job. Is there a better one? Again, this is a leadership thing because people need time to do it. So I’m not an advocate of creating stuff from scratch, unless there’s a real reason for it or, you know, I’m absolutely driven to do this, but it shouldn’t be de facto. That’s what I’m expected to do. I’ll give you a quick example that, you know, there in my own background, which is religious education, we’re teaching about the places of worship. Too many of the resources are degradations of places of worship. For instance, mosques, they’re really poorly sketched.
Show none of the nuance or sophistication or indeed paying tribute to the sanctity of a place like that. When I could pull up an image of a mosque in a real place. It’s that kind of thing of going to the original source, but I am going to turn to poor quality resources if I got a lesson to teach the next day, if I’m sitting in a school where I’ve not been given enough time.
Research this. If I’m sitting in a school where it moves, I have to mark it. And if I’m in a school where I’m putting in dodgy data every two minutes, those all cut across fruitful curriculum thinking and planning. So I realize that’s contentious. But the bottom line for me is, is this good enough for the gorgeous children I teach? Does it treat them as intelligent human beings and too many of the resources don’t?
Karl: Great. It was interesting, I think you’d done a talk at Schools North East where you compared some images to those of the mosque and things like prayer mats and it’s stuff like that again which it doesn’t take a lot and I sort of use parallel examples in some of my talks where I share pictures of, you know, we could colour in a picture of the river of the Nile.
To highlight different areas of spending, or getting children to color in different colors and label them. Or we could just look at a really detailed satellite photo of the river now and just really draw it. Well, what does it actually tell us? And I mean, I could get that picture from Google and just slap it on the slide and I can just narrate it. It’s sort of touched on the point of being expert. There is a sort of, particularly in primary, I’m not saying this in secondary or denigrating secondary colleagues, but in primary school, we’re teaching a lot.
Regularly. So therefore we’re expected to be the expert of that lesson until the next one. So again, it’s that time element and it is trying to fit all those little things in that we maybe don’t feel like we’re experts of.
Mary: Yeah, I agree with you and particularly that example of showing a satellite image of the Nile. I need to know if that’s available. Again, that’s a leadership thing. Have my leaders provided the space for me to do that? But I’ll tell you the other barrier to that, Karl, it’s this. If children are coloring in a worksheet, they look busy and there’s something stuck in their books. As in my view, a proxy for learning to show another adult that that lesson has taken place.
In your example, where we are looking at an image of the Nile and all that richness, most of it is going to be talk. So the question we have to ask, which is likely to result in deeper learning and thinking? Where are they going to be thinking? They’re not going to be thinking as they colour in.
Whereas they’re all going to be engaged in a real image. And so we’ve got some wider discussions to have in the sector about what constitutes learning. Because a lot of it is not filling in worksheets.
Karl: And I use a sort of a bad proxy myself, but when I’m doing training, I sort of use the term activity versus task. And both are interchangeable. If we get down to the nitty gritty, they both mean the same things, but I use it to sort of really clarify that an activity is coloring something in, busy work. It looks like things are happening. Whereas for me, a task just by the very nature should be more depth written.
So we’re talking about children talking to one another or practicing with one another or actually thinking about what they’re doing. And even today, so we are doing some pretty challenging work on migration in geography, but it’s all to do with the lens of the Syrian refugee crisis a number of years ago. And we looked at some headlines, actual real world headlines and just unpicked some of the vocabulary used and the picture that paints to somebody who’s arriving in the country and the real human impact.
Connecting human geography or we could have done something completely different. Which was interesting, we’ve kind of already talked about two of the other questions because I think we’d sort of said, why do you think— I was thinking about why fewer schools and leaders are actually prioritizing it but I think we’ve come down to the fact that it’s time and also external forces, so other organizations perhaps putting pressure on leaders or if you’re in a school where outcomes haven’t been as good as you maybe wanted to. And I’ve seen this quite recently when I’ve gone into a number of schools where they want to do work around task design and produce higher quality outcomes, but the time they’ve given for history or geography or RE is 30 to 45 minutes because there’s lots of additional interventions going on. So I think there’s also, you’re right about that wider conversation. Do we prioritize data?
And outcomes and obviously that’s how the school’s judged or do we understand that if we flip it slightly and prioritize the wonderful richness of the curriculum subjects then some of that data will come because we’re engaging in higher quality resources and higher quality thinking. Do you agree or disagree with that?
Mary: Yeah, I absolutely agree. And I think we have to ask what’s upstream from improving results. So if we’re just piling on interventions, there’s a case for interventions when that’s absolutely needed for a child who is a new arrival or who has had significant, you know, loss of learning for whatever reason. But for the most part, we need to be thinking we don’t raise standards through interventions on mass. What we do, if you look at the reading outcomes for the children who don’t do so well in the year six SATs, tends to be a lack of vocabulary. How do we develop children’s vocabulary? Well, it’s through a broad and balanced curriculum, a rich curriculum that exposes them when it’s done properly, and I argue primarily through high quality texts in my work, because of all the research behind that, that they’re sort of bathed, that it goes into their DNA, this rich vocabulary, supports them to think, supports them to talk. And so the best interventions is a really high quality curriculum based on high quality texts. And I’ll give you a quick example. There was a school, in the summer of 2024 heard me talking about the importance of high quality texts and novels. And they decided to give it a try in year six. It’s a bit edgy, isn’t it? Year six. And what they did was they read aloud for 12 weeks in their English lessons, literacy lessons, and they saw amazing results. So they put it into the whole of Key Stage two, year three, four, five, and six.
But what happened with that original year six group, when they took their SATs in summer 25, so last year, so they had a year of it, in one of the year six classes, the 46% of the children reached greater depth.
When the national average is 33. So you don’t get that through interventions, you get that through a really rich entitlement for every child. And it just lifts everyone. And so I’m not saying you don’t have interventions, but you need it sitting within a wider, wider deep consideration of what a quality curriculum provision is.
Karl: I agree and we’ve done similar work and we make the same justification because I think even in Saturn parents evening the question inevitably comes about what can I do to support children for the SATs and reading and one of the things I often go to is obviously our curriculum is broad enough that we still provide them with the offer so we don’t reduce geography and history and RE they still get that even whilst we’re preparing.
For the SATs. But I often tell parents that, you know, in the reading papers that we’re getting, they assume a certain level of worldly knowledge that you can only get from the curriculum. And it’s not, and I love the word used, be it. And I think that’s the key thing. It’s not, we’re not going, well, they, this word come up in this paper and this word come up in this paper. So we need to put that in some progression documents so it’s revisited. It just happens because they’re immersed in it or bathed in that language. So it’s definitely confirmed, even anecdotally for me as well as the research.
And I think there’s a bigger question that comes up and there’s the white papers obviously being released and as it will have done, will have encouraged people to think even further about adaptations and the offer for SEND children. And I think there’s a conversation then, because I think a lot of the work we do, both you and I, fits within this is accessible and adaptable for all, but how do we make sure that the learning is still accessible for all pupils?
And I loved the conversation you had a few years ago, where again, you talk about there is an entrance for everybody, but there is no roof, there’s no ceiling on it. So how do we ensure that when we’re thinking about all these high quality, beautiful resources, that everybody can access it? What’s the secret?
Mary: Yeah, so it’s such an interesting question. And where I think what I think is really helpful here is Gary Aubin’s insights. So Gary leads on SEND for the Education Endowment Foundation and whole education and his work’s, you know, known nationally and internationally. And I had a conversation with him for SEND Her, a curriculum series we did. And so the book on SEND has a number of conversations from colleagues, including Gary, and also from a child with additional needs and their mother, which I can refer to in a moment. But in terms of thinking about the curriculum, Gary’s got a really helpful metaphor, which is, if we imagine that our curriculum has the same, if we think of automatic doors in a big supermarket or wherever. If I’m approaching supermarket and it’s a cold day and I’ve got my hands in my pockets. It is helpful, it’s useful that the doors are automatic, but it’s not essential. If I’m leaving the store and this time I’ve got heavy bags that I’m leaving with, it’s even more helpful, even more useful those doors are automatic. If I’m approaching the store in a wheelchair, it’s essential those doors are automatic.
And so what Gary encourages us to do is to think about the curriculum. Is it useful for all and essential for some? And I think that’s a really helpful lens through which to look at it. And so it’s my view, and I’ve been advocating this for a long time, every child has the, deserves the right to an ambitious, beautiful curriculum. What they don’t need is a diminished diet of differentiated colored worksheets because those just widen gaps. And so some of work I’ve done is to show that it’s possible to convey some big concepts, for instance, in geography, the big idea of geomorphology, the fact that the Earth moves, is a foundational concept or big idea in physical geography. And it’s possible to expose children to that and help them to understand and talk about that term if we do it through high quality texts and images. And so we could start in early years with a lovely poem from Shirley Hughes, Out and About Pebbles and Puddles, starts exploring that language about how stopping the earth changes. Key stage one, we could use the beautiful text by Charlotte Willem and Joergel Sommer, The Street Beneath My Feet that opens up like a concertina. And then the third book we might use to convey that idea would be A Pebble in My Pocket, sometimes used in science. And my challenge when I’m working with heads and senior leaders, and I’ve done this with over a thousand of them now, not individually, but in the conferences, did the last one on Friday, I said, can you imagine any child in your setting, whether they’ve got additional needs or not, if they’re not sight impaired, would they gain something about that big idea in geography through those texts? And of the thousand or so leaders that I’ve done, there was only one the week before who said, I can think of all the children with additional needs, low starting points in my school would be absolutely fine, but we do have one child who needs two adults with them the whole time and they are waiting for specialist provision. So unless, and we know that those children are in our schools, but the majority of children with SEND and low starting points. That’s not the case. There’s something truly inclusive about high quality text with beautiful images and a text that contains that rich language. And by the way, children love knowing where geomorphology comes from and they love all that etymology and stuff. So my argument is every child deserves that, every child. But what I have to accept is the outcomes will not all be the same. That’s a separate conversation.
And we want every child to be exposed to it. And then what follows is I can support them to make that as strong as possible. So I hope that kind of partly answers the case, the point you were making earlier.
Karl: I think it does. It’s interesting when you sort of mentioned outcomes, because it’s a question I get regularly as well when I work with schools. And I use a couple of examples from my classroom and other classrooms in school to indicate, you know, they have the same resource, whether it’s a high quality text or just a very thoughtfully designed task. And they’ve all accessed it. And I’ll sort of— I quote Claire Seeley on this and I’m quoting it wrong because I think she has said something and I then made something up in my head based on what she’d said. But the idea I thought was quite interesting of you’ll have children in your room that maybe have low starting points or have SEND and we can consider them as indicator children. So, and these are the ones that I would be thinking, okay, I’m designing this task and I just have to think what is the core knowledge? So there’s a little bit of Tom Sherrington being quoted there. What is the actual core knowledge?
That I want them to grasp from this lesson that needs to take them to the next one and then the next one. And then that I look to my indicator children and think, okay, well, if that child has managed that basic core content, then everybody will have got it. And then I can then look at the others and you know, your group of deaf children will perform a lot that word in or that phrase. So they’ll remember who all of the, you know, the wives that Henry VIII was married to before that event happened. And they’ll pull all those little bits in.
Which obviously shows that there is, you know, a very high ceiling, but also there is, I’m not using the term low floor because again, it sounds like it’s a very bottom of the pile, but there’s an accessible starting point or the automatic doors have been opened. And I love that phrase. And I suppose then as a teacher, because obviously you’ve talked about high quality texts, I’ve talked about very clear design tasks.
So if you’re a teacher and you’re picking up a resource, how do you know that it’s either looks good or it’s gonna be of high quality? Because sometimes I’ve picked up a book and I’m a sucker for, first of all, a beautifully drawn or designed front cover. And then also then I’m a sucker for an illustration because I like to draw. I love looking at wonderful illustrated books. So how do you know then that it’s actually high quality and useful? The same with a task.
How would you say that would be?
Mary: Yeah. So just to reflect back to you what you’re identifying as triggering your curiosity, it’s something that has been carefully crafted. It’s something that’s possibly got a bit of enigma about it. I think we’ve got to get away from the idea that I’m talking about sparkly butterflies and things and is it fit for purpose? So the questions I ask, has it been carefully designed?
And so I was just on a call earlier this afternoon about talking about the year six science program of study where children need to be taught about theory of evolution. I can either download a worksheet which might or might not be of decent quality, or I can use a high quality text like Sabina Rodeva, Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species. It’s in lots of schools, many on topic tables, sometimes gathering dust.
However, if I bring it forward and read it to my children under a visualizer, the images I can justify because they’re beautifully executed and they provoke curiosity. So one of my questions is, do they provoke curiosity? Right? In a way that a lot of clip art and Canva stuff, I mean, Canva’s, which you know what I mean? There’s a lot of superficial sloppy slop out there. And nobody’s gonna die. It’s not like, you know, we go to the stake over this, but it’s about honing our sensibilities to whether this is truly good enough for my children. So one of the things, does it provoke curiosity? Is it likely to take them to a place of mastery? Are they going to, not in every lesson, but is it going to help them get in deeper to what I’m teaching them so that they can do something on their own terms as a result of being exposed to it at a later date? And that doesn’t sit neatly on a spreadsheet. That is just my making a call on quality for myself as a teacher. And so I think the more we do this, the more we realize that there is potential to ramp up the quality. And then the third thing I would, the third criterion would be, is it closely related to the original source? So there’s lots of resources out there that have been degraded by someone being paid a fiver to knock up the interior of a place of worship, not literally on his sketch, a place of worship. That’s far removed from the original source. And so one of the criteria, and I think we can do is to say, well, what is this speaking from to my children? And so that’s why if we use resources that have been created by people who know what they’re talking about, like Sabina Rodeva, because she trained as a scientist, and then she retrained as an artist. If I’m teaching, for instance, ancient Greece, excuse me, either in history in Key Stage 2 or maybe English at Key Stage 3, ancient Greek myths, instead of some locally, you know, drawings of, say, the myth of Demeter and Persephone, why don’t I go to the British Museum where those beautiful images are on display. Now, I’m a busy teacher. I don’t have time to do that. I need someone who can signpost those for me, or I need a leader who says, right, this is the topic next term. I’m gonna give over whatever amount of time, and I’m gonna let you just play with some ideas for where you might source some of these. And one of the places to source good stuff is there’s lots of stuff on subject associations. I’ve collated lots of lists of high quality stuff as starting points. And I’m not saying I am definitely right. What I’m saying is I’m provoking the conversation. I love it. It’s people to come back to me and say, now I’ve got a better idea for teaching about the myth of Persephone. And it’s this. I’m happy to have that discussion. I just don’t think we have it often enough.
Karl: Yeah. I like that idea of like crafting and promoting curiosity. I think it’s really interesting. I found, I mean, again, I have a similar starting point, but it’s from a completely different source. So I, before I was a teacher or wanted to be a teacher, I dabbled in the idea of potentially being a comic book artist or comic book writer, because I was hugely inspired. And there’s a comic artist slash writer slash academic called Scott McCloud. And he does a lot of work on how you design comics. And one of his complete ideas, which I’ve sort of adapted slightly, is he has a clarity diagram of the secret language of comics. And it’s all about the choice of moment. So we’re choosing to tell this moment now. And it almost makes me think of we have this moment in the curriculum.
Then he says, we’re framing that moment very specifically. So that’s the choice of frame. Why are you drawing that image? And it’s similar to what you’re saying. We’re choosing this page of this book because it’s incredibly curious or provokes some thought. And then he goes into the choice of word and choice of flow. And that for me comes down to actually, I’ve noticed there’s key words in this page or I know that this book is going to be them in the content. That’s just going to immerse them in deeper thinking.
But it’s slow is, well, how are they going to engage with it then and how are we going to get children from point A to point B, which again, I think is something you referenced. So, yeah, I think there’s so many different parallels and I find that we probably don’t do enough of this in PGCE, which is ultimately what I’ve decided is early on teachers career. And I get it. We’re learning how to walk, essentially, when you’re doing your PGCE.
But I think we can drip feed these in more regularly, which is why one of the reasons I set up the Facebook group and the community that we have was because I didn’t feel there was a community that was free of judgment, because that’s the first, because even I remember when you post something on Twitter back in the day and somebody immediately jumped on it and said, this is rubbish or can’t believe you’re doing this, because everybody has their own opinions.
But I wanted to craft that space and community where people could post and go, what do you think of this? And get some honest feedback. And again, I’ve shared a lot of your work on there, which has been inspiring for people. I mean, I think there’s one big principle today. There’s two things I want to mention before we maybe go to questions. But the first is if teachers could take just one thing or one principle away from the conversation we’re having around quality and design.
And I know that’s going to be quite tricky, but what would it be? So what would your one takeaway be that you could go and do tomorrow and then the next day of the week in the month?
Mary: So I think about this on a scale. So one level of the scale is, that’s interesting. Could I do something with this? I reckon my class could get something out of this. And the other, which is good, which is good in my view, and the other end of the scale is, this makes my heart sing. I can’t wait to share this with my class. And you don’t get those moments all the time. That’s not what we’re after.
Opening up the conversations about having some more sensibility as a sector to basically is this good enough visually and content wise for my children. And, you know, I’ve got lovely examples and photographs of colleagues when they work in this way, because leaders have created the time, photographs of staff meetings where they’re talking about, and everyone is beaming.
How many schools can say that? But when we’re intentional about this stuff, it’s like people start falling back in love with their work again. But I will repeat this. I don’t think it comes— It should land just on the shoulders of individual teachers. And I think it can be left to goodwill. You’ve got to be intentional about it and create the space. And it is possible to create the space. I know the Prickens crowd, I— everyone’s absolutely shattered. But I’ll give you a quick example of what one leader did when he was worried about his colleagues who he realized didn’t have a very good understanding or broad understanding of children’s literature beyond the diet of Dahl and Williams. So instead of nagging them and getting stressed out, he just took one staff meeting and instead of the usual staff meeting, everyone came in and he just put a pile of books on the staff room table. And he said, as they came in, he said, just pick up any book that takes your fancy and spend the next half an hour skimming it or reading it. And we’ll put what we would have covered into an email and then come back and chat about it and just use the rest of the meetings to chat about it. And what he found was everybody, virtually everybody wanted to take their book home. Why was that? It’s because their curiosity had been provoked and he actually got into trouble because he hadn’t bought enough for all the teaching assistants. What great problem to have. Oh, please, sir, can we have some more homework? You know, it’s thinking imaginatively like that if we want to see sort of school change and system change. You’ve got to think about what are the conditions that make this happen. Because I’m not going to do it. I’ll be honest, just because my head teacher tells me to in my own time, you know, when I’ve got a home to run, I mean, you know, and all that stuff, we can’t put that burden on people. We have to use, as starting point, the directed time that we have. And so when we’re thinking of working in this way, it’s an opportunity for cross, you know, across the subjects or pick on one subject, say what are the most gorgeous things we could find and have a good old debate about it. It’s very energizing.
Karl: Well, it’s interesting. It’s a similar sort of strategy for when we’ve looked at tasks. I mean, I do the same thing. I’ll be scrolling or I’ll spot, and I was in a museum not long ago. I know it was the Baltic. So I was in the Baltic and I’d seen a, it wasn’t even a picture. It was an infographic about the artwork that it was about to step into. I thought oh, this is an interesting way to set this information out. So I took a picture of it. And then that inspired a task that I then did with the children. And I think that idea of curiosity is lovely.
And when we’ve done it, and this is kind of how I model how I work with schools when I go in, is yes, I’ll share three models or four or just basic thinking models. Cause a lot of the work that I’m inspired by comes from the sort of extended mind theory, Annie Murphy-Paul, and making what’s in children’s heads less abstract and more concrete. And using that idea that a blank page is terrifying. So we need to provide something to at least work with.
And what has always been interesting, yes, the models are fine and there could be anything. And I think that’s the point that some people miss. It could be anything, but it’s the go and here’s something that I think worked in my class over the last couple of weeks. Now I want you to try it and know that it’s going to be rubbish, literally putting it out there and going, you’re going to have tons of examples, which are going to be really, really bad, but just give it a go over the next half term and then come back. And what was really enriching and lovely was the whole school having tried the same thing in different subjects, different times with different age children. And then even we have a deaf resource base in school as well. So the teachers within the deaf resource base are using the same model, but for the children’s personal understanding of deafness and the scenarios that the deaf children will have encountered. And the way in which everybody sort of went around the table, making like, that’s really interesting, taking pictures and thinking about all the different ways that they can use it. And again, I suppose I would consider myself then a leader, as I’m part of the curriculum team. So then me presenting a model used in multiple different ways, then distributed out to staff reduces A, the workload, but gives some tangible actual real examples of when it can be used. So I suppose there’s lots of parallels there. And I like that point. It’s almost challenged me a little bit on the thinking of not expecting individuals to do it.
Because you’re right to think too often not we’re told we have to do a bit of research or it’s part of the job to do a bit of the thinking. But our leaders make enough space for that as well because speaking as a parent of two young children myself, you only have so many hours or minutes in the day. And I suppose my last point kind of bridges on— AI has been hailed by the DfE as being this sort of bringer of workload reduction. And obviously, I know Phil and I are working within an AI sphere, but I personally believe that the work that we’re doing is much more thoughtful and purposeful. And I suppose how do we encourage teachers to still have that love of planning? Because I think that’s gone to a degree because there’s lots of schemes available. And we’re time per hour, so obviously we go to the resource that we know is high quality. But how do we instill just a little bit of planning in the age of AI and the age of schemes that are available, just so that we can, I’m not expecting everybody to do everything from scratch, but just to find a moment in their day that they can plan a moment of curiosity, what would be your advice?
Mary: Yeah, so, you know, I’m a great believer in not doing things from scratch. If there’s a good idea out there, I’m going to take it and credit it, if I’m able to do that. You know, there’s no copyright on good ideas. I think whether we have a curriculum that is adopted or adapted or created is a decision across different subjects depending on, you know, how much resource there is both in human capital and resources that are bought in. The critical thing for those is that they have been carefully evaluated before offering to staff and then conversations about how we’re going to use them. I don’t think, I think we have to do this iteratively. I don’t think we can shift into saying, you know, every lesson’s got to be planned from scratch. I think it’s more like a sequence of learning which happens over a number of days of weeks is a more fruitful way to look at it. I actually think the one with the highest leverage is a high quality text for the narrative element. That’s so much heavy lifting. I’ve selected one of those and share it with my class, but you know, it’s almost too good to be true. But the schools that are working in that way are finding great gains as I referenced earlier, not just for children, but joy being reignited for teachers. Again, it’s not that I want to put the whole thing on leaders, but it’s like, if this is important and the curriculum is our main thing, then we have to, then leaders need to create the time and the space for this to happen. And if it continues after that time, it’s a bonus. But I think with careful planning, when you get into the gist of something, it becomes faster.
It’s always a bit stickier when you’re first getting going. It’s always a bit sticky for the first time of teaching. But then it does get, it does get— so I’m not suggesting, you know, people need to do stuff in depth. It’s about getting to the spirit and the gist of what it is we’re trying to teach. And also opening up far more opportunities for talk and dialogue. Because we need to be extracting the value from the fans that we have. And too often there’s a tendency to what I call the curse of content coverage. I’ve got to move on because it’s on the plan. Well, the plans are never more important than the pupils in front of me. And so I need to be thinking about is am I extracting the best value out of the plan that I’ve either inherited or created? And a lot of that is going to be through extending talk and providing proper structures for children to think and pair and share, for instance. So it’s not a straightforward tick box answer, I’m afraid, for that one.
Or indeed ever.
Karl: I don’t think ever will be. I think there’s two things that I often go back to and think about. One is, so I’ve started not ignoring, but glancing at the objectives in the curriculum, because a lot of my work makes me go back and forth between the actual curriculum. But it’s the sort of preamble. And I mentioned this in my book, Learn and Delete Computing. That’s the bit that really sums up what this subject is supposed to be about.
I think if you look at that, and so if you’re a computer lead, history lead, geography lead, you’ll obviously be given time or you hope if you’re not leading like five different subjects in one form entry school, but you’ll obviously be given time to look at your subject. And I always tell people just look at that first, because it tells you exactly what the subject is supposed to do. Like the computing one, because obviously also computing lead, talks about teaching skills to solve problems to change the world. I think lofty, like huge ambition. But if that’s what you want your curriculum to do, then you need to go back to it and think, well, what is it that I give the children? What are the opportunities? Are they just logging onto that website that’s massive, where they can just go through the different steps or are they doing some actual thinking? And the other thing that I’ve started saying is the Franken scheme. So taking elements of what’s free and like you said, if it’s out there and it already exists, I’m not going to reinvent the wheel. So I sort of take elements of good quality things from subject interest groups, obviously with credit, and just pepper the curriculum with it. So here’s a good place to go for this lesson or here’s a good place to go for this lesson or this resource here is really good. And just draw those things in, never in a purchase scheme.
But in stuff that’s freely available, start building your own picture of what you think the subject looks like for me. And again, leaders would do that, but also subject leads. And I think the big thing I’m taking away is A, leaders and teachers need to be given, sorry, need to be provided and given space and to have an actual conversation about what they’re teaching and what’s purposeful based on the context. This was A.
Mary: Yeah, and I can see some pushback on that and the time and the space. But we’ve got a lot of stuff going on in schools, which is not adding value to learning. Most marking doesn’t. Whole class feedback is better. Most data doesn’t tell you anything. Look at children’s books, talk to them. And this differentiated worksheet stuff is— So we’ve got to look hard. If we’re going to be doing this properly, we’ve got to take a brutal look at some of the stuff that’s getting in the way.
Karl: And yeah, it’s just, and well, I think, I quote you regularly, I mean, the curriculum work’s never done. And obviously we’re about to have the curriculum review sort of in all honesty going forward. But I think before we go to questions, just, could talk to you for ages, Mary, so it’s been a pleasure.
Mary: It’s great talking with you as well. And I love the fact that you go to the start of the National Curriculum Documents. They’re not going to change hugely. But I’m very happy to take any questions. And there we are. Great. Amazing.
Q&A
Mary: There are some questions in the chat. So there’s one from Kerry. Is there a book in Mary’s repertoire that she recommends on this subject? I’m going to have to think when exactly in the conversation that question came.
I think it was about the, my arguing that we need to draw on original sources. And, you know, like the British Museum ones, I think it came in then. Kerry might want to confirm or not. If that’s the case, if it’s okay, if I share my screen, I can show you where I’ve got some free resources for that. And it links to what Karl’s just saying just now about the important statements at the start of each the National Curriculum documents. Is that okay to do that, Phil, if I just share my screen? Yeah, definitely. Okay.
So on The Teachers Collection, The Teachers Collection, we have some bonus resources, free resources. And I’ve got here Four Steps Across the Curriculum, which I’m going to click onto. And so what it does, takes, what I tried to do was to find a straightforward way of having a look at what the curriculum journey was like from primary to secondary. If you take the one for history, they all work on the same way. And so what we’ve got is the first step, which is the subject overview. And on just these, obviously, when the new curriculum orders come up, I don’t think they’re going to be changed substantially, but there’ll be some tweaks on them. And then, for each of these I say the national curriculum important statements. For me, this is where the magic is. It was lovely to hear you talk about them, Karl, because what tends to happen is we go straight to the curriculum programs of study without understanding that bigger picture. And so I quote that right at the beginning and then people link through to read the rest of the national curriculum programs of study. It’s that way around, but I think it is just so important. But the bottom of this, each of the initial curriculum subjects, I’ve got links then to where you can then find some additional resources so you don’t have to do it from scratch. And so those are free to access, just go to The Teachers Collection or go to marymark.com and that will be in there.
And again, for each of the subjects very quickly, don’t tell the publishers, but I have downloaded and put into PDFs each chapter from Primary Her and Secondary Her. So in this one, you want to find out what someone goes about— someone who’s doing great work goes about thinking about history in primary, just read what Bobby has to say, and they’re not setting themselves up as being perfect. They’re just this is how we go about it. So make max 10 minutes to read.
And then some background, etc. And so what we’re doing here is we’re building this picture. I’m particularly keen to get secondary colleagues that they should be reading Primary Heritages if they’re teaching history or geography. See some of them. And then there’s a secondary one, you do the same thing. Okay, so that’s just to give you what that looks like. And then we’ve got some more stuff going on there as well. So, Karl, would it be helpful if I put the— if I put that in the chat?
I just put bonus resources and then people can get to it from there. Got other stuff there as well. I’m not going to go into that as well. But at the each of those, let’s stop the show, each of those subject ones, I have pulled together links as starting points for going to the original source, if that makes sense. I hope that’s helpful colleagues. And so I’m just putting this in.
So you can access it from there. Hope that was helpful. Amazing. Thank you so much, Mary. There’s another question.
Well, there’s a comment from Sheila. I’m a school leader who’s hugely passionate about children finding joy in their learning and can relate to everything said during the session.
And then there’s a question. Our school is a firm believer in using good quality texts and we have invested in beautiful books but there’s a limited budget and we struggle to share these in a two-form entry school. How do you get around this? Also using books for other subjects sounds lovely but if you struggle with vocabulary slash reading is it not another barrier for other students for EAL, SEND, low starting points? I hope that makes sense. Yeah, it does.
So first of all, the schools where they are doing this in English and literacy, they do— they have invested in a copy for each child. But the ones for using across the curriculum, you only need one copy and very often they’re in school anyway. And if they’re not, they’re a tenner or less, because I’m showing it through a visualizer or if it’s Kindle version, I’m showing it through the whiteboard. To your point about if you struggle with vocabulary or reading, is it not another barrier for other subjects for EAL and SEND and those starting points? No, it’s the opposite. It’s a truly inclusive practice. Yeah, if I’m a child who has my first language other than English, the more I hear interesting stuff read aloud, because I don’t need to decode it myself, the more that language goes in.
And I’ll just give you the headlines of, you know, what they found in working in this way when it was done in English for 12 weeks. You’ve got schools with children making two years progress in that time. You’ve got schools where in year two, 93% of the children made at least six months progress. In year four, 83% of them making at least six months progress. And this is across the board. And so the very act of hearing the language is helping them to learn. And so, yeah, it’s the opposite of barriers. It’s truly inclusive. And that’s what all the evidence is saying. But something also too that the neuroscience is telling us that, but we know that lovely atmosphere that happens when we’re doing something together. Interestingly, it’s based on a high quality text. So yeah, I’m quite strong on that. It’s the opposite of, it’s just truly inclusive.
And what was the other one? There was an interesting one from Naomi. How do we get the balance right between evidence in books and adding value to learning? So my question is, who’s the evidence for?
I talked to masses of children with their books. I said, well, just show me something that you’ve really enjoyed learning about. And they pull up their books. And these hyper-aritaning children, they said, just tell me what you learned there. And they can hardly tell you anything, even though there’s masses of written work in there, worksheets all filled in.
You know, I was talking to a child in year four a little while ago and we were looking at her literacy book and there was some lovely work in there, lovely creative writing, but I noticed that a couple of lessons before she and her classmates had been learning about homophones. I said, homophones, those are interesting. What have you learned about homophones? Anything interesting. And not a clue. I assumed she’d learnt it though because she completed a sheet. That’s the evidence in her book. It had been ticked off, smiley faced by the teacher, no doubt having turned some spreadsheet green for that key performance indicator. So I assumed she’d learnt it.
But she couldn’t, and that’s because the completion of the task was more important for whether she’d learned anything. So we have to ask, who is the evidence in books for? And Tim Oates is very good on this. He— what we’re trying to do is work out whether children have been thinking, because that’s learning, and that’s through the things that they produce. And it can be lots and lots of things. It doesn’t just need— the worst thing is that example of the homophones. You can think of plenty as well.
Masses of staff and children, why are we doing it for other adults? They’ve been to school. If they can’t work out what my children are doing by talking to them and seeing the products of their learning, they shouldn’t be doing the job. So we’ve got to have some tough conversations about that and move away from the idea that a lesson hasn’t happened unless there’s something in children’s books. Sorry to be robust, but I feel really strongly about that.
Karl: I think I got this question regularly as well. But sometimes the challenge is, well, you do this, this, this in the books. What’s the reason? And for us, it’s not a monitoring thing. It’s not evidence of the work. It’s to build up a picture for the children. So because we use retrieval in every lesson and that continues flicking back. For us, it’s about building up a story and a narrative. So in geography, we’ve done this. Then when the children are looking at their work. And even when we do assessments, somebody asked me how you assess in your wider curriculum topics. And I said, well, the assessments isn’t really about remembering what they’ve been taught. For me, I try and develop assessments that allows the children to make some sort of connection or use the information they’ve taught. So the children can open their books, they can flip back, they can go to lesson one, two, three, four, whatever it is, and they can draw upon that. And it’s about building a clearer picture.
So that they can see, in this unit of work, they have done this and this meets this. So I think, again, it goes back to that conversation, well, who’s it for, why? Yeah, I agree.
Mary: To what extent are children involved? You know, as well, are they part of this? Or are we judging them and sticking it on a spreadsheet? What apps do they— data on a spreadsheet? Yeah, and so there’s, there was a nice question, or it was someone who, the opening, so colleague from Fairfield Road, just going to bring him up— great, through quality literature and English, please.
What I’m going to do is I’m going to put in a link to the research that you can, yeah, the research that sits behind what I was referring to, because I’m just conscious of time, but it’s absolutely compelling.
Then Sheila’s point on adaptive teaching versus traditional differentiation. Yeah, anything by— thinking of for today.
I’ll need to think. I don’t want to hold people up, but I can forward.
Phil: I was actually sorry, I was just going to quickly say Lanny Florian in the Scottish— She’s a specifically like in the Scottish context. She’s written— I know a lot about that. So that might be— so much like I can send a link in the chat. Sorry. Sorry.
Karl: I was going to say a lot of the work I’ve done around adaptation versus differentiation has been specifically inspired by Claire Seeley. She wrote a fantastic blog called the Four Verbs Approach and it’s kind of an approach they use completely at Guernsey. So I’ve done a bit of work with the Guernsey schools recently and it’s really interesting to look at that as a lens in which to think about what you’re doing and it’s all about anticipating and attending to memory demands basically.
We know that certain children in the room are going to find this and this difficult, so we have to anticipate it before we attend to it and then reduce it. And then I know Alex Ferlam’s written some of this stuff recently about adaptations and adaptive teaching. So there’s definitely some go-to people that I’m sure Phil could send out some links.
Phil: I was going to say, maybe I can send out, so I’ll publish this on the Substack. I can put some links on there as well for everyone. But sorry, Mary, did you want to say something? Yeah,
Mary: it was Margaret Mulholland I was thinking of. And so I’m just dropping a link in there. She’s doing some great work as well as you say, Alex Ferlam, Rachel Ball are as well. And as I mentioned, Gary Aubin as well.
I mean, the main thing is, and the work of Teach Us Too as well is doing some great work, but we must never assume our children can’t cope. They can. We’ve got to be prepared to be surprised. Amazing. Well, I think that’s a good note to end on. As I said, I’ll put some of the links we were discussing in the post about it, but thank you so much, Mary. Thank you so much, Karl.
It’s been such a rich conversation and thanks so much for everyone who’s joined and all the amazing questions and comments. Really appreciate it.
Great to be with you all. Thank you.
Karl: Thank very much.
Mary: Bye.
Karl: Bye.