Knowledge and retrieval and Mantle of the Expert.

(an unrelated picture of a mammoth)

Recently - perhaps over the past year or         so     - I've been thinking about knowledge, knowledge organisers, knowledge-rich learning, retrieval practice and such  things. Ironically, I don't pretend to have much knowledge about any of them, but I wanted to work on how I could more effectively teach knowledge through Mantle of the Expert.

(Mantle is, of course, about learning so much more than knowledge. But knowledge is the focus of today's thinking).

Naturally, as you'd hope, I always had some idea of what I wanted my children to learn through mantle. However I was never thinking too carefully about whether or not they were learning it. I assumed - as with any pedagogy -  that some things stuck and other things didn't. A reception/year 1 class is no place for tests and I tend generally to make a few notes each lesson on what has been learnt in that moment - not really thinking about longer-term learning. However, the more work I did through Mantle, the more I began to suspect that children were learning a lot, and learning it well. 

This academic year, I made some changes. I wanted to make sure I knew exactly what I wanted the children to learn, and I wanted to make sure that they learnt it well. I shall not claim that it's working brilliantly, but I think there have been some positive steps forward. 

What I've been doing.*
*nothing groundbreaking, but I've found it interesting.

I have been creating knowledge organisers.
These were more for my own reference than to give to the children; I didn't want to let them know everything they would be learning through our Mantle because that would (in my opinion) significantly take away from the story. However, I wanted to ensure that I was very clear on what knowledge I wanted to get across to the children. 

I have been planning mantle sessions which use and re-use the knowledge that the children are learning. I think this had been happening incidentally quite often, but I decided to be more purposeful about this. Two small examples:

* Carnivores, herbivores, omnivores. During our Percy's Park Keepers Mantle in the autumn term, my R/1 class became very confident on this. Almost every chapter of our mantle involved park animals and so almost every session involved talking about whether they were carnivores, herbivores or ominivores, and how the children knew. We made medicine suited to each diet. We ensured carnivores were kept away from small prey. When a gruffalo appeared in the park, apparently having a negative impact on the mouse population, there was a further opportunity to use and re-use the children's knowledge.

* Fire fighting equipment in 1666. During a Mantle I carried out with a year 1/2 group, the children were called upon to become a team of expert fire marshals. This involved training to fight fires in 1666, learning about the equipment used and - most importantly, for my purposes - fighting fires, in our story, using that equipment. The team had the opportunity to do this on several occasions. This way, not only were they retrieving the knowledge but they were using it for a real purpose within our story. 

I have been flexible about which knowledge is taught when.

It can be easy to try and shoe-horn information in to a 'topic' or a mantle, just to say that it has been taught. I always try to avoid that (with mixed success). With this in mind, I planned out the knowledge I wanted the children to learn, but I did not plan how that knowledge would come about. This way. I ensured that the children learnt the facts at the right moment in a story, not in any particular order. 
Two small examples:

* The children learnt about the diet of hunter-gatherers at the very end of our Mantle on the Ice Age. It was almost an after-thought. I could have taught children about the diets of hunter-gatherers early on, when they were learning about who they might meet in the Ice Age. Instead they didn't need this knowledge until the end of the story. They'd met a hunter about to kill a mammoth. With this tension over them, the children had to find him some alternative foods for said hunter. Out of the story, we then did some work on hunter-gatherers and their diets. Back in the story, the children put their knowledge to purposeful use. The work they produced was beautiful and showed their investment and learning.

* In contrast, the children learnt names and features of mammals at the very start of our Percy's Park Keepers Mantle. This was because there was a good opportunity to learn this (rescuing animals after a storm) but also because I knew it was knowledge that we would revisit again and again and again throughout the story, because of the nature of the work we were doing within it. 

Again, this is nothing out-of-the-ordinary. I have just been piecing together a way of trying to refine my practice so that I am using Mantle to make knowledge-learning purposeful, and a ensuring that knowledge-learning happens thoroughly and deeply. 

Incidentally, I decided to set the Year 1/2 class a quiz on The Great Fire of London. I was almost worried to, in case they had in fact retained nothing. However, to my pleasant surprise, the scores were very high across the year groups. 

Having said all of this, my approach still apparently needs refining: having taught my class all about animals and their homes through mantle (or so I thought) I was a little disappointed when more than one of them ran up to me yesterday to tell me they'd found a fox nest on the field.

I'll work on it.