What word is missing? Knowledge retrieval in English is ______________ and it isn’t all about quotations.

 “The sweetest honey is loathsome in its own deliciousness. And in the taste destroys the appetite.” 

Let’s be clear: English has a funny relationship with knowledge and knowledge retrieval. Pick any two English textbooks and you’ll see what I mean. They are never alike. They don’t have the same topics, terminology or even approaches to the subject. The knowledge taught will be vastly different. That’s why schools rarely teach English through textbooks. We cherry pick aspects because the rest of the book doesn’t do it how we see fit. 

Look at how Knowledge Organisers were used by English departments, when they were all the rage. They focused on plot, key characters and some contextual background. They were useful to ensure that everybody knew the plot, but I’d argue you aren’t teaching the text properly if the students can’t recall the plot or the key characters. That is the beauty of narratives. They are instantly stored in memory. I can remember films I watched decades ago. The same applies to books. Our brains are stored for retaining narratives. It is just the rest of it that is the problem. My Year 11 can recall the plot of ‘Romeo and Juliet’. Mostly the rude bits and the death scenes. But, nonetheless, they can remember it. What they lack, like most students, is the knowledge of subtle aspects in the play such as the writer’s intent, the audience’s reaction to certain moments, less dramatic moments, characters with only one line, and  the reasons behind choices. Yet, we boil knowledge in English to quotations. If they can remember quotations from the text, they can write well. 

Now, the knowledge monster has developed a new head: knowledge retrieval at the start of a lesson. Across the land, leaders are insisting that lessons start, including English, with some knowledge retrieval. English teachers across the land are responding with comments akin to Harry Enfield’s ‘Kevin the Teenager’: WHAT? THIS IS SO UNFAIR! English doesn’t lead itself naturally to knowledge retrieval. Mainly, because we pull on lots of knowledge domains that don’t actually appear in English curriculums. I’d use a student's understanding of fishing to explore a poem. I’d use a student’s knowledge of plants to understand what an image means in a play. I’d use a student’s knowledge of Brighton when reading a piece of nonfiction. We don’t read texts in isolation. We knit threads, connections and webs between things. If we taught things in isolation, then my SOW for Romeo and Juliet might run something like this: 

Lesson 1 - Learn about Italy. 

Lesson 2 - Learn about Verona. 

Lesson 3 - Learn about the culture of Italy. 

Lesson 4 - Learn about England's attitude towards Italy in Elizabethan times.  

We don’t work that way. Texts don’t work in neat, pretty ways. They work like spider webs. They sit in the middle and we look at how they connect. We work from the centre to the outside. Not from the outside to the middle, which is what other subjects do. To know A, we need to cover X,Y and Z. Instead it is messy. 

The other problem with English is the transient nature of the things we teach. Yes, we teach novels, but that isn’t really ‘powerful knowledge’ (copyright Ofsted). The knowledge of Long John Silver having one leg is of limited value. It’s of use when studying the novel in Year 7, but will they be able to use that knowledge when looking at another text in Year 8? Not really. That knowledge does not have longevity as it is only needed for that text. It ‘might’ be of use if there is direct reference to the character in another book. This is what makes knowledge retrieval problematic in English. Yes, I could make some knowledge retrieval questions at the start of a lesson on the text we are studying, but it serves very little value in the wider picture of learning.

Everybody loves terminology and it seems that knowledge has got its own set of words around knowledge.  The problem is that these only over complicate things. For me, there are three areas of knowledge in English - knowledge / skills / experience. Now, I think it is important that we see English in three areas. The webby nature of it means that everything is connected, but they can stand on their own occasionally. The ‘knowledge’ is a large part. That might be the knowledge of what a simile is and what not a simile is. The ‘skill’ is the ability to replicate a simile in their own writing, which will demonstrate their knowledge but also their ability to manipulate it. The ‘experience’ is the area that is always missing, I think. That is the experience of seeing multiple examples in various contexts. The ‘experience’ is the key element of this triangle, which I think has been missing for a long time from discussions. Everything has been clumped together and ‘experience’ has been neglected. 

English is largely about experience. We give students multiple experiences - novels, plays, similes, images, sentences, words used in different contexts - and this is what makes the subject so rich and beautiful. We are about the experience and the danger with emphasis on knowledge is that it neglects skill and experience. The reading of ‘Treasure Island’ is an experience that I want students to use when faced with another text. There may be something small that resonates, echoes or contrasts with ‘Great Expectation’ in Year 8. I don’t want them to recall everything about the plot, characters or quotations for retesting in following years because it doesn’t have that much value. The knowledge of the experience is the important thing. That knowledge isn’t testable. You cannot test it. It is an experience. Part of that experience is building knowledge, but it is a snowball effect rather than a discrete thing that can be tested and retested. 

Our relationship with knowledge needs to be reasserted for English. Yes, do knowledge retrieval at the start of the lesson, but it needs to be integrated into the skill or experience elements within English. We don’t just do knowledge; we do other things that are reliant on some form of knowledge. The retrieval should be about building webs or connections and not reliant on spurious knowledge that isn’t connected. I think that there are some people who think that everything has become about knowledge in English and I don’t think that is the case. It is a part of the lesson but it doesn’t dominate the lesson - and that’s what we need to be mindful of. The sweetest honey is loathsome in its own deliciousness.  We need to work on building a healthy relationship around knowledge and developing an appropriate balance. Other subjects can bathe in knowledge, but we in English sprinkle it around like holy water. It is part of the ceremony, but we use it sparingly, because it is blessed.  

We’ve been using Carousel to help with our knowledge retrieval in English and in particular KS3. The great thing about the Carousel system is it allows for a lot of freedom from an English teaching perspective. Unlike other systems, it allows for students to write free text, which means that multiple interpretations can be accepted or explored. There’s no expectation that English has to fit down a simplistic binary ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ route. In responding, students can provide different examples and they can be assessed as correct. English is a subject where there are several right answers and not simply one.  

Plus, as with the new questions for GCSE Literature texts they have released, there is scope to work on the ‘webbiness’ of knowledge in English. The questions are not simply about recalling answers parrot fashion, but about connecting parts of texts with each other or effect with techniques. A lethal mutation I have seen with knowledge retrieval in English is a complete focus on quotations to the point that students are reciting quotations and just that. English is the subject of thinking and not recalling. If we make all the knowledge about quotations, then we are not arming them to think. Most GCSE essays need ‘several’ quotations or references to the text. Only ‘several’. If we make knowledge retrieval just about quotations, we are just filling up buckets. We need to make knowledge retrieval around quotations draw attention to the webbed nature of English, as Carousel has done with their questions. See more about Carousel here.

As a school, we’ve been looking at how we can use Carousel in other ways. So, for each year group, we have a bundle of questions related to the powerful knowledge taught in previous years and that year so that we can revisit, revise, and connect different bits of knowledge together. When visiting Macbeth in Year 8, we can use the questions from Year 7 on Shakespeare’s theatre as part of our knowledge retrieval. We have even used it for the knowledge around exam papers. See below. 

 

But, on a day-to-day basis, you don’t always want to have clear knowledge questions. You might want to have skills or experience based questioning. That’s why we have played around with knowledge retrieval. Are there things that I can do with knowledge retrieval that is less so much about the knowledge aspect and more about the skill or the experience? 

Retrieval around word meaning 

We have a bank of words and we can start with students defining the words. Students are then primed for doing this on a text they haven’t read before. Gets them thinking about word meaning from the start.  Or, they look at creating a sentence based on these words. Or, if you are studying a text, see if they can use them to describe aspects of the text. 

Retrieval around syllables 

We’ve placed emphasis on students’ knowledge of syllables, alongside work on phonemes too, so we have a bank of words. Students are testing their knowledge of what a syllable is, but also working on the skill to identify the syllables in a word. Yes, I could have created questions around ‘what is a syllable?’ but that doesn’t address the ‘webbiness’ of English. Here we prime students so they can look at rhythm in a line of poetry or a line from Shakespeare. Or, their own poetry writing. We also mix it up with knowledge around stressed and unstressed syllables. 

Retrieval around techniques 

Students never need to repeat a definition of a simile, metaphor or personification in their writing for English, yet we constantly ask them to define them. Here, we present examples for students to identify. They have a one in three chances of getting it right, but it helps us to understand if they know the concept. It provides them with the experience of others but also a starting point for writing their own. Which one is best? Which could you easily improve? Which one could you expand on? Which one could you add more to the sentence?  We are testing their knowledge retrieval but we are working on their skills and experience at the same time. 

Knowledge retrieval isn’t that hard to do, but it can become meaningless if it isn’t done with thought or understanding. It is so easy to write questions about defining techniques or filling the blanks of quotations, but will it improve their English skills? No. I have known hundreds of students who could give me a crystal clear definition of a simile, yet their own similes in their writing are rubbish. If we focus too much on the knowledge, we miss out on the skill and the experience part of the subject. Where is your skill retrieval in the lesson? Where is your experience retrieval in the lesson? Knowledge connects, but it is like a web in our subject. You cannot focus on it alone. There is room for all three parts - knowledge, skills, experience - and English teachers need to ensure there is a balance between all three.

English teachers are the spiders of the knowledge world. We spin our webs all over the place and we wait for some unsuspecting creature to become ensnared in the web. We listen for the vibrations on a thread. We knit connections where are none. 

Thanks for reading, 

Xris 

When did knowledge become such a dirty word?

When did knowledge become such a dirty word? For some subjects, it isn’t a dirty word. In fact, it is the bread and butter of lessons. Go to any Science or Maths lesson and you’ll see what I mean. Yet, for creative subjects, like English, it has become a word associated around Gradgrind principles and sucking out the fun out of lessons and learning. Oh, you are one of those knowledgy teachers: I bet students hate your subject. Popular belief would have it that knowledge is one arm of Hydra’s plot to take over the world. Other conspiracy theories are available.

A teacher’s job is to teach knowledge with the aim to improve the student. That might be knowledge behind a skill. That might be content knowledge. That might be subject domain knowledge. Like sand from a beach, knowledge is everywhere. You can’t escape it. Like sand from a beach. I might be wearing my creativity speedos, but you can guarantee there will be a grain of sand somewhere.

My first year of teaching was awful. I meandered from topic to topic and the knowledge in English I was teaching wasn’t focused and, at best, it can be described as meandering. I meandered through writing to persuade and I meandered through some poems. Yes, I might have done some interesting things with the topic and I taught them some interesting things about pikes, but I meandered. When I started teaching English, there was a lot of freedom, but also a lack of clarity about what knowledge was important and what wasn’t so important. That is also the problem we have with new teachers today. It is so difficult to work out the knowledge needed. And the hierarchy of knowledge.

English does work differently in terms of knowledge compared to other subjects. Its fuzziness is one its flaws but also its source of beauty and delight. Maths can hone their knowledge into 100 key facts. English can’t do that so easily. I could give you a 100 key facts about A Christmas Carol. Or, I could give you 100 key facts about Romeo and Juliet. But, what I cannot give you, is 100 key facts that students need to know for English. That’s because English is such a fuzzy subject. We are doing so many things that we cannot limit knowledge, because English is the limitless knowledge subject. It has no limits. In lessons, I could be talking about a text and then I have to break out into some teaching about Science, History, Geography or another subjects. I might teach English, but I have to be prepared to teach aspects of History at any given moment. Only this week, I had a lesson broken by a student’s train of thought about animals. They wanted to know what prevents animals getting tooth decay if they eat lots of fruit. English lessons are a delta of knowledge. We go anywhere in a lesson and we are taken on that path. It is also why English lessons get changed and adapted so quickly and often. No two lessons are ever the same in English, because students bring something of their own to lessons. That might either be a lack of knowledge or their own knowledge. Either way dictates the direction of the lesson.

English is the one subject that doesn’t work like others in terms of knowledge. I will scream from the top of the mountains that last sentence. I don’t mean it in terms of ‘look at us; aren’t we special’ but in terms that our subject has a real problem with adopting knowledge models from other subjects. We could easily simplify English to 100 key facts, but that wouldn’t help them in exams. In fact, it would be so damaging, because students, in English, need 100( to the power of 100) number of facts to address the unseen elements of exam. They need world knowledge. They need spelling knowledge. They need sentence knowledge. They need grammar knowledge. They need past reading knowledge. They need situation knowledge. They need word knowledge. You get the drift. A student brings so much to a text in English. They are suitcases of knowledge and with the suitcases’  contents they formulate an idea, an opinion, a judgement or an inference.

Knowledge in English isn’t a dirty word in English, but our relationship with knowledge needs some work. We need a healthy relationship with knowledge and a realistic view of it in our subject. English tests all knowledge regularly but how do we support that in lessons?

We have been trying something to build that healthy attitude towards knowledge. Last year, we had a disaster of introducing knowledge retrieval in KS3. In my naivety, I thought it would be great to do three low impact knowledge tests in a unit. It wasn’t great. One at the start. One in the middle. One at the end. What could go wrong? Everything. We are testing too much and without meaning. The logic behind was to show improvement in knowledge retention, but it was soulless, meaningless and vapid.

This year, we’ve thought about how we can use knowledge assessments meaningfully that works with the subject and not against it. We have separated them into three elements – memory sparks, memory makers, memory tests. Each one takes a lesson but there is a clear purpose behind the phases.

 

Memory Spark

At the start of all units, we have a small quiz which focuses on some of the knowledge taught in previous years we think it relevant to the topic in some way. Our curriculum has a through line for topics and they link back to previous years. For Year 7, we make connections to primary content and the primary curriculum.

The great thing about this is that builds the message that all learning is important. The new topic doesn’t negate all the things taught previously. The new topic isn’t starting with a blank slate. The knowledge is connected from the start. Remember when you explored character types, well, that links to this bit.  

There’s no collection of scores or even test element. We’ll assume that some things will be forgotten, but it gives us a chance to review what’s be retained, what’s be forgotten and what’s been corrupted and misinterpreted over time.

 

Memory Maker

In the middle of the unit, we have another quiz, but this time it about building more links across domains. At this point in the unit, students have got a grasp of the key ideas and so it is perfect time to build on those connections.

Building connections is an important aspect of English. We are expecting students to build connections between factual knowledge in an exam so we need to get students searching for meaningful connections. Experts do this naturally and novices don’t. We had such an interesting discussion with Year 7 about the portrayal of the warden in ‘Holes’ and the various books they read when exploring character types in our ‘Heroes and Villains’ unit. That built up their understanding and showed that their previous knowledge and experience is redundant. In English, all knowledge and experience is valuable; you just don’t know when it will be called into action. And, there lies our biggest problem.

This, for me, was the most interesting and fun aspect, building connections. We rarely do it, but it was fun for me. Getting them to make and build connections across subjects. All too often, it is relying on me making connections or the odd student offering a connection.

 

 

Test

The final aspect was a multiple choice quiz. Using a PowerPoint and a sheet, students had to answer the questions on a grid. Yes, we marked it and students had a score, but the most important thing was where students got things wrong. So, for the bits they didn’t get right, the wrote down the key thing they needed to know. That will be their starting point for their end of year test. After each topic, they have a list of things they need to work on.

The great thing about using PowerPoints for MCQ is that I am able to use the slides for hinge questions later in the year. Also, I am able to build them into the topic next year – especially the parts that they struggled with.

The test becomes more of a diagnostic tool and we identify the knowledge they need to work on.

 

 

We, of course, do other things with knowledge but this is what we’ve done in KS3 to help structure knowledge focus. We do knowledge retrieval on a regular basis, but this is how we use systems to support and raise the profile of knowledge in the subject. It works on three main principles:

[1] Past knowledge is equally as important as the present knowledge;

[2] Connecting knowledge is an important aspect of English;

[3] Quizzing and testing help to revise forgotten knowledge and identify areas to focus on.

 

For the rest of the lessons, we are reading novels, plays and poems and writing creatively. The natural flow of creativity and knowledge attrition through reading and experiencing texts continues to happen. We just have a visible discussion about knowledge every so often. Knowledge is part of the discussion and learning. It isn’t about learning things by rote or cramming students with hundreds of spurious facts. It is about having a academic, thoughtful and humane approach to English. Each lesson has knowledge. We just do it a little bit differently than how others do it in their subject.

In English, we teach students to think and read how others think. That sadly is hard for the rest of the world to quantify and clarify. English is the subject with endless knowledge. Be my guest, try to quantify and clarify English as a subject, but there’s a reason why there are hundreds of novels and books written a year. There’s a reason why dictionaries are updated yearly. You cannot pin down language, thoughts, feelings and experiences. You can pin a few down, but you cannot pin every single one down and fit it on a knowledge organiser.

Thank you for reading,

Xris