I’m more excited about this post than I’ve been about any post I’ve written in recent years. I’ve been building up to it since the summer. At my trust we’ve developed and trialed these resources and now we have some preliminary results.
In recent years, our understanding of how best to teach science has improved. We have planned curricula and developed our pedagogy with an emphasis on knowledge retrieval. I believe this is at least part of the reasons why our international rankings in science (Year 5 and Year 9) have risen (see here).
I believe the next step is to work on building rich and connected schema – taking the knowledge our children have and focusing on making this knowledge flexible. Some schools in the US have shown the way (see here) using rich and connected texts.
These are short linked texts which the teacher reads regularly to their class. Each text last at most 5 minutes, but follows a key concept from the unit and applies it to a new context. That’s it. Over a few weeks, the students are exposed to texts broadening the range of examples and contexts in an efficient and effective way. You encourage the students to think about the text by thinking aloud and asking questions.
Here is an example we’ve trialed in my trust: Rich and Connected Texts: Forces LKS2
Over the next couple of weeks I will share some of the outcomes achieved by children using these resources.
Ben
Reading for Learning 