Road to Joy
Highly-structured knowledge-rich teaching is sometimes accused of being joyless, and schools attempting to move in this direction ought to take this concern seriously. A hastily-introduced, top-down, Ofsted-inspired move to KR could easily result in sceptical teachers, unaligned with the approach and untrained in its nuance, delivering a poorly-designed, cobbled together mishmash of knowledge organisers, quizzes and tests. This would be bad for students and teachers, and could do lasting damage. So how should schools pursuing a knowledge-rich approach avoid this, and find joy? The following might be worth bearing in mind. Fun and joy are not the same thing. I'm fortunate to go to a lot of lessons, in a wide variety of schools. In lessons where there is an expectation of highly-structured teaching, the students are often either listening to the teacher, having focused pair-discussions, or working independently, usually in silence. There's not a whole lot of what might be describ...