5. It's Understanding, Not Knowledge: In Conversation with Lucie Turner

Ever wish you could unlock the true potential of your students? Today, we're joined by Lucie Turner, a dedicated history teacher from St. Anselm's Catholic School, who reveals her strategies for success with Bedrock Mapper's disciplinary literacy curriculum. Lucie highlights the transformative power of this program, guiding us through her hands-on experience in leveraging Bedrock Mapper as a pre-teaching tool. She underlines the importance of knowledge-rich learning in a student's journey and delves into how a year-round focus on keywords, instead of a term-based approach, yields better learning outcomes.

Together, we peel back the layers on the significance of keywords and concepts when teaching history - how these foundational elements pave the way to a deeper understanding and knowledge for students. We also identify the critical role of real-world examples in connecting with a student's pre-existing knowledge. We even touch on the distinction between history and literature and its effect on our teaching methodologies. Lastly, we take you on a reflective journey, emphasizing the valuable role of self-reflection and note-taking in personal growth. Join us as we celebrate the power of education and our shared commitment to making a difference in the lives of students.

Find St Anselm's Catholic School, part of Kent Catholic Schools Partnership, on social media:
x: @St_Anselms
Instagram: sacscanterbury

As a school, St Anselm's do some incredible work with mental health alongside the NELFT team. See what they do and find out how your school can get involved.

Transcript

Andy: 0:20

Welcome to the Literacy Works podcast from Bedrock, where we talk to the most interesting people around the country around using Bedrock and all things literacy as well. Today we are joined by Lucie Turner, who is a history teacher at St Anselm's, and really St Anselm's kind of came to the fore in my mind as a school to really engage with and speak to about this, because they're a fantastic case study use for Mapper, the disciplinary literacy curriculum that we offer. That's incredible. It happened before I got to Bedrock at Mapper and I don't know how it's been achieved. Incredible solution that we offer for schools and we want to talk to real schools, real teachers, about how they use it.

Andy: 1:02

So today, as I say, we have Lucie Turner with us, who is a history teacher at St Anselm's. So first of all, thank you for giving up your time on what's an incredibly busy Monday morning as we approach Christmas. So thank you so much. We appreciate you coming on. So, Lucie, could you just start by telling us a little bit about your role, the kind of pupils you teach and kind of? Yeah, just start off with your role, really.

Lucie: 1:21

Hi Andy, I'm a history teacher in a effectively secondary modern, because we are a well comprehensive, because we are between lots of grammar schools in Canterbury and you know we have quite a high percentage of special needs children.

Lucie: 1:39

We have an excellent SEN department and specialist resource provision. So, yeah, we have a very wide range of students and we've been using Bedrock for about well more than two years now, I think. But over the last year we started using Bedrock Mapper for subjects and, as with everything, it's only as successful as the teachers that use it. So Bedrock was incredibly successful and we were all on board with that, all subject teachers as well. So we were all promoting it, not just the English department. As a result, that gave us a bit of an into. We wanted more and then Mapper came along and it's been amazing because per subject you know, we can start building in our tier three words and you know we've been doing this. We've been working on literacy in tier two and tier three words with the whole school, like we've been doing in this department across the whole school.

Lucie: 2:52

So we were coming to a bit of an impassive like where do we go next? Because it's all well and good as talking about it and then implementing it into the curriculum, but actually we wanted to find a bit of passion around that and we could see that, you know, the English department had Bedrock to use for their homework, so we wanted to get in on the action and it's been amazing. So, as we rewrote our curriculum for 2020 and moving on from that and knowledge rich curriculum, we'd all had, you know, keyword lists and we use keywords every lesson.

Lucie: 3:25

So Bedrock Mapper has been an absolute godsend because we can set these as homework, so it's prior pre-learning and it was a great way.

Andy: 3:36

So you use it as a pre-teacher, do you?

Lucie: 3:37

Yeah, basically we use it alongside every homework. We basically set it, especially in the history department. We set it alongside every homework that they have as a little task and it's been brilliant because it means that students come through the lesson knowing words, you know.

Andy: 3:55

Yeah, of course.

Lucie: 3:57

Beginning to understand concepts.

Andy: 3:59

It's interesting. I mean, you set it alongside homework. That's really interesting, and so would you. And how did you go about? You talked about kind of you rewrote your knowledge, rich curriculum, and I think a lot of schools including my own school and I was a head of department we did that and we were I think we felt really passionate about that. Did Bedrock help you channel some of that passion in some way? Did the Mapper help you do that and, if so, kind of how?

Lucie: 4:23

Yeah, because obviously we had our keywords and in history, as I imagine, with English, we had thousands and we all know that that is just too much.

Lucie: 4:31

You know you don't want cognitive overload. So the idea of then having Mapper and being able to filter out what wasn't really needed, it made us relook. It was really good because, as we're, you know, you never stop planning your curriculum, you're constantly tweaking. So it made us relook and filter out those concepts that we could see were coming up in other subjects as well, or not filter them out. But either you know, knowing that they're in the background, and which one specifically we needed, and you know we sat down as a team, we sifted through all the words and then to think, well, how many do we want to set?

Lucie: 5:10

And that's a real challenge actually, because you know you can set as many as you like and then Bedrock has its recommendation and then we talked and we did research and we set it up on a sort of aggregate basis. So it built up over time. So we started off with, you know, term one, words. Term two, term three, and we'd seen in a few subjects where they just blocked them for the term so you'd pick five to ten keywords, you'd put them on.

Lucie: 5:39

Kids would go and practice those and then left them. So once that term finished, those words finished. Well, we decided to be a little bit renegade and we kept ours going. So once we opened a block of keywords, we keep them rolling. Interesting.

Andy: 5:59

Because it filters them through the topic, doesn't it? So if you were doing I mean forgive my ignorance, but you're doing like the Norman conquest, then you're doing like the third right. When you open up kind of other topics, the pupils can go back in and recap those at any time, as well as having, obviously, the reteach queue as well. Where pupils haven't mastered words, the words will be introduced to them as well. So you've got that sort of double whammy going on there, haven't?

Lucie: 6:19

you.

Andy: 6:21

That's really interesting.

Lucie: 6:22

And that's it was. So I've got a bit of an anecdote which I really love that when we were teaching or pre-teaching.

Lucie: 6:31

So in the homework pre-teaching year eight last year, we were using words around public health in the 19th century. So they were learning about, you know, the industrial revolution, as we always do. But they had specific words around cholera and laissez-faire, which we use in our GCSE as well. I mean, we've written our curriculum to spiral up to our GCSE anyway. So we're like, right, okay, let's get these words in here. You know you could say the word. They just need to know what cholera is. But actually we wanted the whole concept and the understanding around it. So we gave them these words by the time they'd got to the lesson and we were talking about you know, the state of the condition of sanitation and water in the 19th century. And I put up the word cholera. The kids thought I know what that is. And then, as well, you know key figures like Edwin you know things that you wouldn't normally necessarily think, oh, I'll push my year eights that far.

Lucie: 7:35

And this wasn't a top set, you know we'd still stream at Key Stage 3, and it was a mid set and someone had come in to observe, actually from another school in Kent, not related to our school, so from a different partnership, and they watched this lesson where the kids were just throwing at me, you know, key understanding, not just words, but key understanding around the topic.

Andy: 7:58

That's the shift, isn't it? Yeah, it's not just words, it's understanding. That's the shift.

Lucie: 8:02

And it was. You know, I started to mention things like cest, pits and privies and you know no, sewers. And then when we moved into sewers and they were telling me you know they'd started to make that link already and it was amazing. So one. It reduced the load for me as a teacher because their pre-teaching, their prior knowledge, was already there and it was just up to me to keep that going through that lesson and get them to it. And it really encouraged the kids as well, because they were like, oh, if I can feel this confident in a lesson because I've used Mapper and they keep using it, which is just amazing.

Lucie: 8:40

And the power of words, those kids, the confidence. And I can vividly remember you know three or four students who you know are on the SEM register or not even diagnosed with certain things. They're going through the process now where they can come to lessons feeling very underconfident and it will display itself as certain behaviors.

Andy: 9:00

Yeah, yeah.

Lucie: 9:01

And they were over the moon. And then that gave them the confidence to them right, which they don't normally like doing. And the teacher that observed just couldn't believe it. He said how do you? How have you? These are year eight, they're not even year 10 or 11. I said, I know, but we, you know, we've got to love this. We work with now, this, this golden start, and we pushed it forward.

Andy: 9:25

So from then, you know, the kids were really into using the words because they felt the power that it gave them and that confidence of coming to a lesson and knowing what a word meant it's interesting, you know, because as an English teacher it's funny you touch on 19th century. There I teach, I have taught a Christmas carol and I have I've come on my own journey with this. I've written about this actually on on on for the Bedrock website and I taught the pupils misanthropic and partly I'll own this, I'll be honest about this. I did it because it was invoked to teach vocabulary. It was invoked. It was like, well, I'll do it because I was very much Twitter trend, the latest, but I'll do that because everyone else, all the cool teachers, are doing it.

Andy: 10:10

But then what I found? I stumbled across something. Actually it's not just about saying misanthropic because that's a posh word. It's about the knowledge that underpins it, because misanthropic means anti-human. It goes beyond just being a bit miserable. It's anti-human because it's an allegorical tale about humanity and cynicism. And in the same way, that latches onto that deep knowledge and it's helped you there to latch onto that deep knowledge for your pupils, about their learning and also, by the way, almost that happy accident of connecting the learning as well, like knowing what cholera is bringing that in and that's so powerful, isn't it for them.

Lucie: 10:47

And I think you understand laissez-faire as well. Yeah, it's a fleamy way, you know. I know adults that know what that means.

Andy: 10:54

Yeah, I know exactly.

Lucie: 10:55

And it's been wonderful because the kids that started that A couple of years ago yeah, we must have been doing better a couple of years ago, because no, last year at least we, because we've got now year 10s who, if I say laser effect, they know what it means and you know we go through it again and discuss it, but it's just wonderful. So we've pushed now, as a result of that, to get the funding from school to push it into GCSE, because for us to be able to then build those words again Same words but in a different context for some of them is Just invaluable, especially for effectively reading subjects like ours.

Andy: 11:37

Absolutely, and so I'm gonna ask you a question. That might be a bit of an awkward one actually, but I think it's an important one to ask. There's, you'll know, there's other red tech platforms out there. You know that will. Where you can, you can watch videos, you can set quizzes and the pupils can do those and you can check whether the pupils have done that and it's self-marking and all that Type of thing. There's numerous. I mean wouldn't take much to go and look them up. Even people didn't know. What, for you, is the attraction to mapper when there isn't Videos, particularly to watch on it? There isn't, you know, there isn't kind of loads of that kind of talking through how to answer a specific question. What's the attraction as a classroom teacher to mapper for you?

Lucie: 12:19

Because it's not a quiz, it's not, it's not knowledge based, and I think the hardest thing is that you know, with a knowledge rich curriculum is that's actually a bit misleading the term, because it's it should be understanding rich. And what bedrock mapper does is it ensures that the understandings there and and the reteaching as well, you know the algorithm where, if they've not understood, it comes back. I really love as well, I mean it the kids in. I think it's a glitch at times, it's hilarious. But it also brings in other subjects, any other mapper words that they haven't learned well enough.

Lucie: 12:57

And I love that because we're obviously moving now towards Epistemic learning, cross curricula. We're gonna work in as a school we're working towards sorry, building in links across subjects to get you know it's really difficult to get kids to conceptualize across subjects. You know there are many words we use in history that are used in maths and science and the kids do not, you know, interconnect or they certainly don't bring them across from subjects. If I say the word hypothesis, they don't know what I'm talking about. As soon as I talk about maths and science, they they get in, you know, they start to get an understanding and that's what mapper does Without you know, I don't have to do anything, and that's the best thing ever. I don't have to do anything except.

Lucie: 13:44

And set the words from my curriculum so simple and on that.

Andy: 13:50

And one thing I often speak to schools about is the power of mapper isn't just about what gets served to the pupils but what gets served to the teachers in terms of the red and the green, the you know the subject, insights, understanding where the gaps are. But I think the other sort of on serve on song bit about mapper is the conversations that I mean you've said before about you. You went through those conversations about selecting words what, what, how did those conversations go when it came to selecting words what, what? You know, what did you do? How did you go about that as a department?

Lucie: 14:23

Well, it's not easy, in the sense of there are thousands of words and then sometimes there aren't words, and that's equally a challenge, you know, and can be frustrating when there's a particular word you might use. But Then, looking at it, we don't want too many, we want to be able to Be on a on the same page as well, which really was great for us as a team, because it meant that we were all Looking at which words are being focused on and we're all on the same page together Rather than off in our silos and just you know teaching keywords at the start of a lesson.

Lucie: 15:04

It was interesting because you know where certain words are available. You start to rethink well, how is that fitting into the curriculum and is that actually that important? Is that concept as important as another one? And so when we went through some of the words, especially I, things around, what were one, what were two and it's you know which events as well, because it doesn't just have words and concepts, it's got events. So it's like balancing up between knowledge. So for us it's AO1 and AO2. How much knowledge, how much explanation? What words are needed for the AO2, the explanation? So again, they're the concepts and the theories, as opposed to balancing up with knowledge, words in terms of events and people and places. And it's just been really interesting. It's enabled loads of conversations about our teaching.

Andy: 16:01

Yeah, I've had two really interesting conversations recently with colleagues about this type of thing. The first one was when I embarrassed myself with a colleague, kate Stockings, when we recorded a podcast and I gave this really loose, half-baked explanation of GDP, she was like no, actually it means blur, but my half-baked explanation of GDP gets me by over dinner table. It's fine, like it kind of. If it gets mentioned on the news I can understand sort of what's going on. And the other one is assassination.

Andy: 16:30

So a colleague, your colleague, melissa, mentioned earlier about assassination Archduke Ferdinand was not murdered, he was assassinated, you know, and he wasn't killed because he wasn't hit by a bus, he wasn't murdered because it wasn't kind of random, he was assassinated. So assassination and GDP, you think well, yeah, that's a key word in a subject. It's more than that though. It's unlocking understanding about, because if it's assassinated rather than being hit by a bus, it's so much more and you can understand the significance of that and unlocking the deeper knowledge. And I loved what you said before about I was wondering where you were going to go with it, where you said it's not about knowledge, I was going to be said here, but actually then you said understanding, which I think it's right because it's a concept, it's not a key word. I've never liked, I've never liked the term key words as such, because I think, well, key, what does that even mean?

Andy: 17:25

Well, actually understanding and understanding that knowledge is so important, isn't it?

Lucie: 17:30

And that's really interesting. You say that actually because I had a spate last year when we were really embedding the use of MAPPA words and the kids were like, well, key words. I said, do you really know what key words means? Why are we focusing on these key words? Why am I getting you to go home every week and look at at least five to ten key words? What does the word key mean?

Lucie: 17:53

And I put it on the board and we discussed it, and I did it with every class that I have, including my year 13,. Because key means to unlock, and it is that unlocking the understanding. And these are why we're picking these ones, because it unlocks further understanding or deeper understanding of all the other things I said, and you know, you know as a teacher, the minute you start teaching key words you could, for so you'd had five words you could practically teach a lesson without opening a textbook, without anything. As soon as you unlock those five words, using students prior knowledge and their wider world knowledge, they can pretty much guess what the lessons all about and what they're learning, which I absolutely love.

Lucie: 18:35

But yeah, we just use the term throw away key keywords, but actually you know, to metacognitively discuss with the children what do we mean by keywords?

Lucie: 18:45

and it's unlocking and I love that I love the idea that we've got a program that supports them in unlocking that knowledge because it links it to their. You know you're asking earlier on about what's so good about Bedrock, and it is the fact that Bedrock uses real world examples with the students as well. So it's not just you know they've learned a fact about history. Not at all. It actually connects to what they understand about the world. And you know, you know bedrock itself and then bedrock mapper. It's connecting to their world and I love that because it's just about unlocking.

Andy: 19:26

Yeah, and I think it's so interesting to kind of hover on that idea about about what words mean, because analysis means to loosen or to untie, and evaluate means way up and assess, and I think it's really important. I completely agree. I remember listening to a lecturer talk about Macbeth and he spoke about the importance of equivocation as the theme of Macbeth. The idea that everything is about being, is misleading of it, and so unlocking means something very different in English, where you're in literature, when you're basically exploring the spiritual element about what it means to be human, whereas in history I mean Shanahan talks about this in terms of the discipline of literacy that we've written about before as well you know, history exists for a different reason than English does. English is about, kind of in a literature is about exploring the soul, whereas history is about sequencing and understanding and and kind of interpreting the significance of the past so that we can understand our present and future. Am I misspoken?

Lucie: 20:29

there. Yeah, that's right.

Andy: 20:31

And I just think there's something here about no, mapper hasn't got videos and no, it hasn't got kind of all that stuff that you might see elsewhere. But that's almost. If you expect that, then you're almost missing the point, aren't you? Because it's about no, we're going to be, we're going to have the integrity to sit together to look at the important knowledge that we're going to unlock for our pupils. We're not just going to wham them off on a quiz somewhere and say, go and do that, off you go. We're going to say no. These are the 10 most important things, because even in, even in Mapper, for a Christmas carol alone, the 60 words, you wham them in front of the kids and off you actually know it's not enough.

Andy: 21:06

You need to pick the five or 10. I mean, and that that's what I was going to ask you In terms of your day to day with Mapper, what does it look like for you in? I mean, they do it in the class, they do it for homework, but do you use it in lessons to talk to me?

Lucie: 21:20

No, we don't. So we set it as homework. We sit together as a department, we use the program there, and that's kind of the last point that we look at it in terms of. We then get the feedback from the students. We do, obviously, we demonstrate with the kids at the start of the year how to use it, etc. But we actually let the children go and do the work, because we're working on independent learning, and then they bring it to us so they discuss with us.

Lucie: 21:51

We see we hold them accountable if they haven't done it, because we get the lovely email, weekly emails per class that tell us who has and who hasn't and what they've learned and what they haven't, which is really good. That's where we pull it back into lessons. We take those emails and if there's a class where I mean I don't highlight individual students either and I certainly don't put that email up with names in front of them, but I can pull out, then which words are they struggling with? Which words haven't they touched at all, and we can build that into the learning and that's how we use it. We use it. So actually it's really it's not intrusive for us as teachers. We utilize it in the sense of, we set it up and let it run, which means it's, in terms of workload, is zero for us as teachers, but it gives us insight and it gives us understanding of where the children are at, which is great what you want. So it's low input, high output for us.

Andy: 22:56

Yeah, and I think that's so important, because the word I keep coming back to is that is integrity, the idea that you've spent a time, you've front loaded it by picking those 10 words, and when I say front loaded, you spent maybe half an hour to an hour discussing it, but then actually you've also got.

Andy: 23:11

There's a pedagogical element here around teachers as well, in terms of you've got probably I don't know, I don't know your context, but you may have less experienced teachers in your team who actually I'm teaching the same content, the same key words, as Mrs Miss turn down the corridor, yeah, and actually she's experienced and she knows what she's doing, and I'm teaching the same words as Miss Turner, yeah, so I know that that's a certain amount of confidence building there isn't there, because I remember when I was just starting out, you were in silos. Yeah, it was like every man and woman for themselves off your, off your pop Whereas this is really about sharing that knowledge, isn't it, and it makes you come together and yeah definitely makes you come together and it's really nice to work as a team on it.

Andy: 23:57

I think so.

Lucie: 23:58

It's just lovely talking about words which I know that's ridiculous but I've talked to, you know, colleagues in maths and in science and pe. Do you know what we love our subjects, and so to actually sit down for half an hour and just talk about what we do, what we teach, now as in you know, the subject it gets you back to talking about your subject and it leads on to many other conversations.

Andy: 24:25

Yeah, I agree, and in the age where we some schools I'm not saying all schools, but some schools have fallen, fell to top down curriculum, that's kind of you know, you must deliver this and and there are, there are merits to that I respect to understand that Actually really giving teachers the space to love, understand and kind of really conceptualize their own curriculum is it. I think that's really really important and incredibly important. And so just before we finish, I did touch on a few other subjects there what, what else is going on across the school with my bird?

Lucie: 24:59

what's your? Understanding about the teacher I mean obviously, because we don't meet is.

Lucie: 25:04

Yeah all the departments together. I mean we do have literacy sessions together and we might talk about it and we talk to each other about it. Yeah, I don't particularly know what's going on in other subjects. I think it's much like ours, but the kids and they're clearly setting map awards because the kids will come to me on those glitches, as they call them, and go out they gave me a dt word, only I got maths one. I was like yes, that's right, you need to practice before you move on, which is also nice because it brings us together in the power of literacy and subjects.

Lucie: 25:37

And we did. When we set out together as a school on this journey, when we embarked on it, we were all together. We didn't just, you know, it wasn't just department by department, we all sat together, we all discussed and so, yeah, now we're that two solid years in, coming into our third year. I think, well, where we're going as a school, I know, is that we will go into this cross curriculum I'm not planning but working together and to see where our connections are across our curricula, curricula and we will, you, we, I think we'll be reusing and re looking at bedrock then to build the power in into that. There was something else earlier on, sorry and about.

Lucie: 26:19

You know what the beauty of bedrock is for us and you know, away from the bells and whistles of videos and I just need to say it is exactly that. There is no distraction. It allows children to concentrate, because my son uses it and I watch him and you know they have to sit. They have to sit and read. There is a reader if they can't, you know, and if they struggle, and. But they have to sit and look and concentrate and there's image. There are images, but very few and it's like one per concept yeah.

Lucie: 27:01

So there's no cognitive overload, so there's a reduction in distraction and it's not just a fun play thing. It's easy to use but it's valuable and as an educator, I love that. It's not just I'll say a little quiz here and video there and move on Is something that they do have to study, but also the limited on the time that they use it. So that's fantastic because they actually get frustrated in the end because I want to do more.

Andy: 27:30

Yeah, and I agree with that. And it's interesting because anyone who's listening to this, who knows me, will laugh when they say that I love ed tech and I'm always on the next ed tech platform and I love it, and they know that this is made. This is my, not my things. The next thing but one thing I've always seen with bedrock is that from all the platforms I've ever used, seen launched, it's had the least amount of resistance from pupils. I think the pupils, when they see it, when it's been launched effectively and when they've had that rationale communicated to them, it's the one where they see their potential being unlocked the most, the most and the quickest. So I agree with you completely.

Andy: 28:09

I mean, I said this time and time again this year you wouldn't have got me at the classroom for anything else. I'm coming to work with a drop. I miss the classroom every day and I do, and I miss my school. But I know that what we're doing at bedrock is so important and I value that and it's been lovely, lovely, lovely to hear you speaking about it Just every time. You've pretty much spoken today. You should see my notepad. I've got timestamp. Go back to that time stamp. Go back to that. There's so much good stuff, there's so much brilliant stuff and it's been lovely just to listen, you know, just just just just to someone really living and breathing this. So thank you so much for your time.

Lucie: 28:45

I had to take notes.

Andy: 28:47

Sorry, I took notes because I was like, oh, we do need to sort of like go back to that we do need to revisit that so that's what it's all about, and I think everyone, in every walk of life, any walk of life, if they're not reflecting and not making notes and they're not looking at themselves, then Then the journey's come to an end, and journey should never come to an end in that, in that sense. So you know, it's been a thrill and a pleasure talking to you and you know everything you're doing.

Andy: 29:12

I sincerely mean. Thank you so much. It's been wonderful, so Will be in touch and thank you and keep, keep doing the good work really, really appreciate it, thank you.

Lucie: 29:22

It's been a pleasure, thank you all right, take care bye bye.