Breaking open the pipeline – or why pedagogy has to serve curriculum

The ResearchEd national conference is always a great way to kick off the academic year, with an almost overwhelming line up of names and ideas to navigate. Building a community of interest around evidence-based approaches is a powerful addition to the sector too, which is no doubt why the ResearchEd movement continues to go from strength to strength. But the conference also raised a concern that has nagged away at me over several years.

Understanding the basics of cognitive science and building a model of how learning happens is foundational for developing great teaching and learning. It provides an anchor for why certain strategies in teaching are more likely to be effective – and, mixing metaphors, a shield against the worst fads that have come and gone after being debunked (learning styles, Brain Gym and all the rest). The learning model is an accepted orthodoxy at conferences like ResearchEd and it sits at the heart of excellent evidence-based programmes like Walkthrus and The Great Teaching Toolkit as well as coaching models like Steplab, among others.

So far so good. However, up until this year, the pipeline which runs directly from cognitive science to pedagogy has also been missing something crucial: the role of curriculum – what is being taught, the text, storytelling and everything that gives the meaning, colour and texture to what can otherwise become a generic approach to improving pedagogy. Curriculum fundamentally mediates between cognitive science and pedagogy.

What Daniel Willingham’s now classic Why Don’t Student’s Like School? (summarised in a blog here) articulates so brilliantly is the connection between the learning model and the importance of knowledge – because this is what students think with. Getting knowledge right – carefully sequencing a curriculum to build rich schemata – is therefore an essential pre-requisite before turning to the pedagogy.

But the argument goes further: pedagogy has to serve the curriculum.

The dangers of getting this the wrong way round are myriad. Having a standard approach to every lesson, pre-determined with recalling prior knowledge (which may or may not be relevant to the lesson at hand), a set amount of direct instruction and moving through I do / we do / you do feels increasingly commonplace – and built on all the right intentions. But it takes no account of the richness of what is being taught and the deep differences within and across subjects.

This is why it was refreshing to listen to Christine Counsell at ResearchEd. Christine gave masterful examples of the importance of engaging children in rich text and story, in ways that don’t submit to a standardised lesson planning approach. Christine illustrated this with an example from Key Stage 2 history, narrating the story of King Alfred hiding in the marshes before emerging victorious in the pivotal action in 870-871 which ultimately led to the founding of England. In a later session, Steve Mastin gave a masterclass on storytelling in history and religion and using an image to ‘storify’ new information in geography.

With enough background knowledge securely taught, children can lose themselves in rich story telling. This builds on insights from cognitive psychology that (i) students think with knowledge, (ii) story telling puts us in a state of heightened attention and therefore offers a much better chance of forming the memories that we want students to retain and recall, and (iii) done well, stories provides a rich approach to world-building that cannot simply be taught as factual information.

Common structures in lesson planning can be useful and some subjects will conform more readily with general pedagogical approaches. However, each subject has its own substantive material that students need to engage with. And each subject has its own approach to accounting for truth – ie the disciplinary knowledge – so we can weigh stronger and weaker claims using evidence.

My hope then is that we place curriculum and the richness inherent in the body of knowledge in each subject back at the heart of the discussion. It feels to me that rather than the current pipeline from cognitive psychology straight to pedagogy, there is a much richer picture waiting to emerge and take evidence-informed discussions to the next level.

James is Chief Executive of HEP. He was previously joint Assistant Director for schools and learning in Haringey Council and has worked in DfE and extensively in central government and consultancy. He is also a parent governor in the Borough.