I found myself doing something very simple – something that I noticed I’ve pretty much done since I started teaching, but this time in a lot more explicit way.
I sat down and listed out everything I want my students to learn. Radical, right? But you’d be surprised how many people neglect this simple act that makes everything so much simpler. Teachers teach better and students learn better when knowledge is explicitly mapped out. They don’t have to spend time discovering it for themselves. I mean it would be nice if our students stumbled on what they need to know indirectly or discovered it through cues we gave them. That’s a really good way of formulating a game, but impractical in the field of education, and especially where results matter. For those of us that want all our students to be at the highest level possible and decrease the chance of unequal distribution of knowledge, explicitly mapping out your curriculum is the way to go. By precisely mapping out the learning to be acquired, all students regardless of their background have access to the knowledge that’ll lead them to success. For those of you that are worried that this’ll stifle creativity or discovery, fear not – it’s the foundation for them to be able to be creative. You can’t build a lego house without lego.
Explicit knowledge is information that is clearly articulated and codified (arranged), making it easily transferable and easily teachable. Textbooks are a classic example of this. All the information in a textbook is clearly there for us to read, and it’s been arranged in particular ways, such as by order of concepts that lead from one to the other, or perhaps (as in History) by different time periods.
In this way, facts, formulas, principles, methods are directly conveyed to students.
Explicit knowledge serves as the building block for structured learning, providing scaffolding by which students can progress to higher levels of understanding. It tells them clearly what they need to learn, and they can tick off their progress systematically. This clarity not only helps to cumulatively build up a student’s understanding of a subject, but also helps to identify and fill in any gaps in their knowledge. Simply, with a clear roadmap, they can see that they’ve covered all the foundational stuff that higher level stuff is built on, and when they get to the higher level stuff, they know what they need to master and they can tick off whether they’ve mastered it. Simply, it furnishes students with a clear understanding of what’s required of them. They can better gauge their progress, appreciate the relevance of each section, and see how things are interconnected.
For teachers, doing this provides us with a clear roadmap of what to teach, which helps us decide how we’re going to teach it, the order that we’re going to teach it in, ensuring that each lesson builds on the previous one and no critical concepts are overlooked. Furthermore, since everything is clearly set out, it is so much easier to develop assessments – you know exactly what you’re looking to test students on and it’s easier to decide whether that’s been achieved or not.
Following on from that, formative assessments become easier. Your questioning won’t be random; instead, it’ll be used to precisely check the understanding of what you’ve mapped out. The tests you create won’t be haphazard – again, you’ll know exactly what you want your students to have mastered with each milestone (e.g., by the end of the first half term, or by the time their mocks come around). This clarity will save you hours in planning and avoid all the confusion and anxiety that comes with trying to design something when you’re not really sure what the end-goal is. Teaching becomes more focussed. Learning becomes more meaningful.
For subject leaders and senior leaders, this is beneficial as well. When your teachers have done this, it helps you to more accurately judge whole cohorts’ performance in a subject area. Gaps are easily identifiable, and conversations with teachers and subject leads become tighter, allowing you to hone in on specific areas that are to be developed or those that have been done well. The conversation isn’t just about “how much are your students learning?”, it’s more about “OK, well quite a few students underperformed on the Marxist critique of the education system so let’s go back and look at how that was taught or how it was tested or how understanding was checked.”
Put it into practice
1. If you’re wondering what this looks like in practice, it starts with me simply sitting down with a bunch of textbooks (currently in Politics A-Level and Sociology). I go through it and I pick out the fundamental points from each chapter that students absolutely must know if they’re going to master a particular topic. I then just type out those points one by one, and I do this for every single unit/module. Here’s a sample.
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2. Open up Excel and start by mapping out how much time you have to teach this content. Organise it by half terms and number of lessons. Remember, you have to get assessments in there as well. Use the above document to roughly lay out the topics you want/ will be able to teach in the time you have. This will also help you decide things like homework, because you might not have enough curriculum time. This is an example from A-Level Government and Politics.
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3. Now the detailed work begins. You can start sorting out the key learning points under each heading, mapping out explicitly what will be covered lesson by lesson. This will also help you decide how you’re going to measure students’ learning along the way, as well as help you to strategise how you’ll revisit learning and consolidate concepts, and even things like what further reading you might want them to do. What I’m saying is, it’ll make your planning that much easier.
4. Prepare your materials based on this – your lessons, your homework, multiple choice quizzes, summative assessments, etc, etc, etc. You’re ready to go.
5. Go one step further. Share this with your students at the start of the year or half term so that they can track exactly where they should be and where they actually are on their learning journey. It’ll aid their sense of ownership over their learning.
AVAIS QURESHI 
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