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We are delighted to be launching a new summer blog series called ‘Opening up conversations about religion and worldviews’. This blog series is being run in collaboration with the RE Policy Unit, a partnership between NATRE, the RE Council and RE Today. It will include contributions from a wide range of teachers, those working in initial teacher education and researchers in this field.

I’ve long been an advocate of what might be labelled as academic, rigorous, systematic, knowledge-rich RE, one that teaches pupils the key beliefs, practices, concepts and values found within some of the major world religions. And I have long argued that this content should be taught in a progressive manner, by which pupils’ comprehension gradually moves from simple to complex as they grow in their awareness of the diversity of expression and understanding found within and without religions.

However, the ideas contained in the Commission on RE (2018) report, and the subsequent thinking developing these ideas has provided me with both the opportunity and the stimulation to question the basis of these ideas about the curriculum. Here I set out some brief comments on just one part of my thinking that I have been questioning.

Is the ‘essentialist’ curriculum model the best one?

The term ‘essentialism’ is perceived in different ways in the RE community. Some argue that ‘essentialism’ narrows and limits understanding and fails to provide a realistic picture of the world and religion and belief. Others, myself included, accept this to a point, arguing that ‘essentialism’ may be limited, but it is a necessary part of the process of learning about religions in a progressive manner, in that what is learnt in this phase is essential for progress to more sophisticated learning.

I would still argue for the latter position, but the ideas found within the proposed National Entitlement statement, and the ongoing work to develop these ideas (e.g. Cooling 2020 [1]) have made me question what might be considered ‘essential’. Let’s consider an example, the Christian practice of going to church. The current approach would seem to suggest that we teach about the church, and what might be found in the church, and what Christians do in the church, and then later on, we might start to consider types of church building, and different forms of worship. But what seems to be missed here is that for the vast majority of people in the UK who identity as Christian, going to church is something they never or very rarely do. [2] So why is a study of the church building considered essential? My concern is that rather than this being a progressive programme by which pupils move from simple to complex, it isn’t progressive at all because it may actually hinder progress in understanding Christians. This approach would seem to make going to church normative for Christians when for many it isn’t.

This is where a range of different disciplinary questions may help. If we place a social scientific approach alongside a theological approach, maybe we will avoid the problem of making normative something that isn’t normal.

And this thought is leading me to consider how else we present that which we study. When we study Christianity (if there even is such a thing as Christianity) then which Christianity are we studying? Do we make normative a male, European, educated, white Christianity, and so ‘other’ different forms of Christianity?

What the idea of worldview has contributed to my thinking is that I need to pay much more attention to teaching students that what we teach is not all that there is, and that the most essential of all facts to teach about religious and non-religious worldviews is that they are diverse.

 

¹ https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/RKMZYYPQMVINAXJPC2R4/full?target=10.1080%2F01416200.2020.1764497&

² Figures for Christian affiliation vary depending on which survey you look at, but range upwards from 38% of the UK population, while figures for church attendance also vary, but are perhaps around 5% of the population

• https://bsa.natcen.ac.uk/media/39293/1_bsa36_religion.pdf
• https://faithsurvey.co.uk/uk-christianity.html

We are delighted to be launching a new summer blog series called ‘Opening up conversations about religion and worldviews’. This blog series is being run in collaboration with the RE Policy Unit, a partnership between NATRE, the RE Council and RE Today. It will include contributions from a wide range of teachers, those working in initial teacher education and researchers in this field.

Approaching two years on, we may be getting to grips with the significance of the final report of the Commission on Religious Education.[i] Some things are clear. To become Religion & Worldviews (R&W), religious education (RE) needs to embody the meaning of the new language of the Commission report. The Commission report never meant that the new subject should simply refer to religions as worldviews or add an extra set of content on non-religious philosophies or ways of life.

What are worldviews? How should we teach about them? How will RE change as we negotiate the transition to R&W? These are the big questions which cannot be settled quickly, but current research brings interesting suggestions into the mix: not easy suggestions, but that is because the transition is no easy matter. In this blog, I look at three current British Journal of Religious Education articles, all of which we have just reported on Research for RE in the hope that quick access to the key points will be helpful to readers.

Firstly, Trevor Cooling confirms that the Commission report proposes R&W as a ‘significant reframing’ of RE, ‘understanding worldview as a shared human phenomenon, of which there are religious and non-religious manifestations’.[ii] When religions are viewed as fluid, complex, diverse worldviews, the subject changes; it moves away from ‘sealed-box’ presentations of religions. One key focus is on the lived experience of people and communities identifying with a particular institutional worldview: CORE, here, draws heavily on Robert Jackson’s interpretive approach to RE.  A second is on personal worldview, where the positive elements of the ‘learning from religion’ aspect of the world religious paradigm of RE are used – pupils should understand the varied influences on them as they form their own worldviews. [iii]

For Cooling, Anthony Thiselton’s ‘responsible hermeneutics’ provides the disciplinary knowledge needed in R&W. It gives teachers three responsibilities. We need to promote rigorous knowledge of what is being taught; ensure reflection on the contemporary context and how it may influence both teacher’s and pupils’ perspectives; and enable reflection on the potential interaction between what is taught and our own perspectives, so that teacher and pupils benefit in their own self-understanding.

Cooling recognises that a workable curriculum and resources are still to come. He also recognises that the need for teachers to reflect on our own worldviews warrants further attention, though in fact the issue is established in research. During my studies with secondary pupils in Sheffield, I found that the RE teacher’s role should be to collaborate with them, modelling enquiry into religions and non-religious worldviews, emphasising interpretation. [iv] Cooling does cite Ruth Flanagan’s research in this regard, and we now turn to it.

For Flanagan, teachers need to become conscious of their own worldviews. Otherwise, unconscious biases may be communicated to their pupils through what we teach, or how we teach it. Flanagan warns of a tendency for teachers to emphasise those parts of worldviews most amenable to our own views on what is rational, and, again, this is already established in prior research, the Does RE Work? data showing how teachers prefer to construct religion as ‘safer’ philosophy. [v] What can be done about this? She suggests that if teachers are supported to reflect on our own notions of a good life, we can guard against only emphasising those features of others’ worldviews that we find palatable. [vi]

It is interesting that though Tuuli Lipiäinen, Anna Halafoff, Fethi Mansouri and Gary Bouma focus on Finland and Australia, they echo Trevor Cooling’s thinking. They do report global trends, principally the decline in ‘old-style’ or ‘packaged’ religion where less and less people follow one religion’s rules, beliefs, or ways. Instead, people’s worldviews often comprise different elements from inside, between and outside religions, and (especially those of young people) they often change. The researchers call for education on these processes, to help young people to understand themselves and others and to manage the ‘superdiverse’ religion and worldviews situation. [vii] Once more, these are not yet curricular plans or resources, but may help policy makers, curriculum developers and teachers to understand the direction of travel from RE to R&W.

Arguably, by my own reading of them, one need pointed to by all three sources is for the future subject to give increased attention to personal worldviews, with regard to how these are formed in relation to complex influences. This would apply to individuals who were studied as representatives of organised worldviews, as well to pupils themselves. There would be balances to seek. Worldviews at the organised or institutional level would need to form a permanent background to the study of personal worldviews. My use of ‘background’ is in no sense intended to suggest that organised worldviews should reduce in importance within the new subject. Of course, I would argue that the nature and influence of large-scale organised worldview movements are also necessary foci in their own right. That the various ways in which wider traditions and personal worldviews interact are hard to pin down offers the rich intellectual challenge of R&W, which  – for all of the researchers whose ideas we have covered  – is also a matter of self-awareness and readiness for twenty-first century life.

Returning for a moment to the interactions between wider tradition and personal worldview, and echoing Cooling’s acknowledgement of the importance in this regard of Jackson’s work, we might bear in mind Jackson’s adaptation of Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s two-level scheme to a three-level one. Cantwell Smith used the terms ‘faith’ (to denote the personal involvement of an individual in a tradition) and ‘cumulative tradition’ (to stand for the entire mass of data associated with the community in question, past and present).[viii] Jackson made several criticisms of this model and added the term ‘membership group’ in recognition that individual identities are also shaped by smaller groups – which could be based on peer, ethnic, family, gender or other relations – within broad traditions. [ix] This point adds ways to account for the complex influences on personal worldviews, especially because the range of available membership groups has grown exponentially over the internet since 1997, when Jackson published the book which I have cited.

We eagerly anticipate further publications on worldviews, in the near future. The Religious Education Council of England and Wales (REC) have commissioned a literature review on the concept of worldview, through the organisation Theology and Religious Studies UK (TRS-UK) which is due to be published soon. This has been funded by Culham St Gabriel’s Trust. Culham St Gabriel’s are also funding the dissemination of a Theos report on worldview, which is due in early Autumn 2020. For more details of these and other current Culham St Gabriel’s grants, see https://www.cstg.org.uk/grant-giving/grants/grants-awarded/

 

[i] RE Council of England and Wales, “Commission on Religious Education Final Report: Religion and Worldviews: the way forward. A national plan for RE,” online material available at https://www.commissiononre.org.uk/final-report religion-and-worldviews-the-way-forward-a-national-plan-for-re/

 

[ii] Trevor Cooling (2020) Worldview in religious education: autobiographical reflections on The Commission on Religious Education in England final report, British Journal of Religious Education, DOI: 10.1080/01416200.2020.176449, 4. See also https://researchforre.reonline.org.uk/research_report/what-does-the-shift-to-worldview-mean-for-teachers/

 

[iii] Cooling, Worldview in religious education: autobiographical reflections on The Commission on Religious Education in England final report, 6-7.

 

[iv] Kevin O’Grady, Religious Education as a Dialogue with Difference: Fostering Democratic Citizenship through the Study of Religions in Schools (New York and Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2019), e.g. 48.

[v] J.C. Conroy, D. Lundie, R.A. Davis, V. Baumfield, L.P. Barnes, T. Gallagher, K. Lowden, N. Bourque and K. J. Wenell, Does Religious Education Work? A Multi-disciplinary Investigation (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 88-89.

 

[vi] See https://researchforre.reonline.org.uk/research_report/teachers-need-to-become-conscious-of-their-own-worldviews/ and Ruth Flanagan (2019): Implementing a Ricoeurian lens to examine the impact of individuals’ worldviews on subject content knowledge in RE in England: a theoretical proposition, British Journal of Religious Education, DOI: 10.1080/01416200.2019.1674779

 

[vii] See https://researchforre.reonline.org.uk/research_report/worldviews-education-in-finland-and-australia/ and Tuuli Lipiäinen, Anna Halafoff, Fethi Mansouri & Gary Bouma (2020): Diverse worldviews education and social inclusion: a comparison between Finnish and Australian approaches to build intercultural and interreligious understanding, British Journal of Religious Education, DOI: 10.1080/01416200.2020.1737918

 

[viii] Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (New York: Mentor, 1962), 141.

 

[ix] Robert Jackson, Religious Education: An Interpretive Approach (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1997), 62 ff.

We are delighted to be launching a new summer blog series called ‘Opening up conversations about religion and worldviews’. This blog series is being run in collaboration with the RE Policy Unit, a partnership between NATRE, the RE Council and RE Today. It will include contributions from a wide range of teachers, those working in initial teacher education and researchers in this field.

As part of the CSTG Leadership Programme I have had the great fortune to be part of a reading group looking at articles relating to RE. Now, I must make a confession or two here. First, I love reading groups and am an enthusiastic member of another in my free time. There is something about reading groups that, I believe, makes me far more attentive to the text. Knowing that I am going to have to discuss it, I busily make notes and try to map out the drift of the author’s thought. Secondly, I came late to teaching – and as a Primary school-based trainee – never had the background in academic pedagogy and theories of RE. So – the opportunity to read Rob Freathy and Helen John’s ‘Worldviews and Big Ideas: A Way forward for Religious Education?’ was one I grasped with both hands!

Ably marshalled by Kathryn Wright and – as always – kindly probed and challenged by the ever-wonderful Ed Pawson, we dissected the ideas set out in the article. Freathy and John begin with the Core Report (2018) and its recommendation to look wider than the ‘big 6’ to incorporate the teaching of worldviews. In what, all members commented, is an immensely readable paper, they canter through a brief literature review of the concept of worldviews in education – pausing awhile to graze on the thorny questions of ‘personal’ or ‘institutional’ worldviews chewed over by thinkers such as Hands and Van der Kooij. In a metaphor I personally rather liked, they muse on whether a Venn Diagram might enable these ideas to be drawn but conclude that this would need to be four dimensional and change over time! What was clear to all of us in discussion, was that this is an issue on which we all felt was not one with clearly drawn edges – that part of the ‘fuzziness’ and ‘mess’ of lifestyles meant that we live in a place of liminality – and very few people have clear lines. I recalled, whilst studying Theology and Religious Studies, one of my lecturers; the very distinguished Julius Lipner – describing himself as a ‘Hindu Catholic’ and describing his interpretation of a Hindu worldview in terms of the banyan tree; with many branches that there is not one clear trunk.

Freathy and John move on to discuss whether the idea of a worldviews education would cause a ‘necessary dilution’ of the content of RE – as some institutional faith bodies fear it might, or that it would increase teacher workload as implied by Damien Hinds’ (2018) response to the Commission report. However, they firmly reject this notion making analogies to other academic subjects, such as History and English and noting that they do not try to cover all of their subjects. It is the approach – rather than content selection – which is key to their argument. Questions of which worldviews may be chosen was an object of discussion – and this extended to the family dinner table – where my son, who is taking GCSE RS as a whole cohort (very much against his will!) questioned strongly whether agnosticism could be a coherent worldview in its own right? Ed Pawson suggested that a key worldview for many young people might be hedonism, and was this part of an enquiry that might take place in a classroom?

In setting out the ‘Big Ideas’, Freathy and John seek to unpack aspects of how a worldview-oriented education might work in reality. For me, two key themes leapt out. Firstly, in Big Idea 2 (BIA2) the extent to which a worldviews approach might enable a reflexive response for students – highlighting the ‘particularity of their own lived experience and their own epistemological lenses’. I have a friend who teachers in a very successful secondary school as Head of Religious Studies, and she often remarks on how students (particularly from minority religions) do not recognise the religion taught in the GCSE spec. Could this approach enable all students to see how all worldviews– institutional and personal – might be inherently diverse, partial, fluid and dynamic?

A final thought concerns the real passion that both Freathy and John have (set out in Big Idea 3 and 4) to close the ‘gap’ between academic RS/Theology and the classroom – both in the wish to see teachers and students as ‘co-researchers’ , but also to see more interaction between departments and schools. The latter, we all felt, is so important – and very much part of what Kathryn Wright is advocating in her new vision for CTSG – to make teachers ‘research aware, informed and active’. I think this group definitely made us feel we were ‘aware’ and becoming ‘active’. More of this, I think is vital for the health of RE – and a paper as well written and accessible as this – will definitely be on the agenda for one of my forthcoming Bristol Learn teach Lead RE Hubs. I may even invite Mr Pawson to bring his wisdom and humour to it!

http://kau.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1386095/FULLTEXT01.pdf

We are delighted to be launching a new summer blog series called ‘Opening up conversations about religion and worldviews’. This blog series is being run in collaboration with the RE Policy Unit, a partnership between NATRE, the RE Council and RE Today. It will include contributions from a wide range of teachers, those working in initial teacher education and researchers in this field.

Reflecting back on my time as a Commissioner and all the data we used in drawing up our final report (Commission on RE 2018), there are two further pieces of evidence which have convinced me that we were right to go for radical change and not simply aim to find more resources to shore up the present system. Both of these were from 2018 YouGov surveys. The first, of the general population, revealed that 55% of those surveyed thought that RE was ‘not very’ or ‘not at all important’ and RE was fourth from the bottom of the list. The second, of pupils, showed that RE was their least favourite subject, with the exception of Citizenship. I find these figures devastating. The title of the popular Facebook group ‘Save RE’ says it all: the subject needs to be saved and whether or not, or how far, you might agree with our recommendations, something needed to be done.

One of our main recommendations was that there should be a National Entitlement (not Curriculum) for all pupils in all schools. That’s pretty radical in itself. It is set out in tightly written prose and each of the subsections is worthy of careful study. As an example, let me take the first two areas that we say pupils must be taught about.

‘Matters of central importance to that worldview’. “Tick”, says the RE teacher and the Agreed Syllabus Conference member, “We do that”. I’d like to think that is the case, but I don’t think I did that, or did it very well, when I was a teacher. It is too easy to fit religions into our curriculum framework rather than the other way round. Take most RE textbook series: beautifully illustrated, packed with ‘knowledge’, learning activities and key questions but so many of them follow the same format, no matter which religion they’re looking at: worship, scriptures, rites of passage – as if these were all matters of ‘central importance’ to every worldview. They’re not. There might be a birth ceremony in Judaism but there’s not in Buddhism. Pilgrimage might be central to Islam but not to most Christians. The first element of the NE asks us to think again about what we are presenting to pupils and how we frame it.

The second is the one I like the best: pupils should be taught about ‘the key concepts including ‘religion’, ‘secularity’, ‘spirituality’ and ‘worldview’…’ . Elsewhere in the report we call these our ‘over-arching categories’. This presents to me a helpful spatial metaphor: rather than not just ‘under-standing’ a religion, we also have ‘over-arching’, a rising above and looking down on the complex, fascinating and essentially important phenomena of worldviews, their complex, diverse and pluralistic nature, their changing patterns and their inter-connectedness.

Each of these four concepts is complex, each contested and each needs to be understood by pupils if they are to make any sense of the world in which they live, never mind continue to create their own worldview. ‘Religion’ is not synonymous with ‘the big six’ – the whole is more than its constituent parts. The zeitgeist of the western world is ‘secular’ and pupils need to understand its meaning, its development, its contested nature and its relevance to understanding ‘religion’ in the modern world. RE teachers often lay claim to ‘spirituality’ when, of course spiritual development is a whole-school responsibility. Religion and Worldviews does not just contribute to pupils’ spiritual development through the content of the subject but  through the opportunity to provide  an ‘objective, critical and pluralistic’ approach to understanding the term, its meaning and its manifestations in human life, including –  but not only  – religious interpretations of ‘spirituality’. It is the term ‘worldview’ that has aroused the most controversy, which isn’t unexpected, but, despite its contested nature, it is a widely-used, overarching term and the one that we decided was most fit for purpose. We knew that a great deal more work needs to be done and I’m delighted that the RE Council is currently leading on that.

And that’s another misconception: there’s much more going on than is evident to everyone. The authors of some of the most significant reports in recent times, all of which called for radical change  – A New Settlement, RE for Real, the report of the Commission on Religion and Belief in Public Life, as well as the Commission on RE –  are continuing to work and to collaborate. Others have taken the initiative and developed responses – primary teacher educators, for example, have developed Recommendation Six and their work is available on the Culham St Gabriel website (see: https://www.teachre.co.uk/itt-providers/primary-itt-tutor-toolkit/). Many individual teachers I’ve met as I’ve travelled the country speaking about the Commission have expressed immense enthusiasm and I hope that will be translated into classroom practice. There’s a long way to go but we’ll get there in the end. We have to.

I believe that a badly done lesson can be as bad as no lesson at all. In the classroom I’m larger than life, pitching myself to be at least 10% more enthusiastic about the day and learning than the students lollygagging towards my classroom are.

But how do you do this through a screen?

My solution was to create short, fun and fact-packed videos, which allow creativity to flow and smiles to follow. My issue with videos about religion is that they tend to be very serious about their content, which is fine and appropriate for some situations, but when trying to retain the attention of 14- and 15-year olds in the midst of a global pandemic, watching a 25 minute video with someone explaining the intricate details of the nature of God won’t hold students’ attention for long.

I don’t claim to have entirely solved this problem, as GCSE Religious Studies is very fact-heavy, but I reckoned that if I made some videos which are funny (at least to my mind!), clear and short, my students might just watch them to the end.

Because, what I’ve noticed is that my student’s enthusiasm for a topic is directly linked to my own. It does not equal it, rather they trail mine. If I am excited and curious about a topic, whatever it might be, they follow me down that path.

And the combined problems of lockdown, coronavirus-proof teaching, teenagers and social media is that information is filtered through a screen, which is easy to switch off or change what it is showing. Not to put too fine a point on it, but RE is always going to play second fiddle to English and Maths.

So I put on a fake beard and pretended to be an atheist. And I plotted out Peter’s denial of Christ using Lego stop-motion. Or I used my daughters’ farm-yard figures to demonstrate the parable of the sheep and the goats (she was upset that I didn’t ask her permission to do this). I have conducted conversations with myself, switching hats and costumes to denote a change of viewpoint (green hat with an Hawaiian shirt represents a liberal view, blue hat with a leather jacket for a more conservative view), and I have taken fruit from my son and given it to his toy dog (aka the Syrophoenician woman in Mark chapter 7).

For me, it was important to make sure they were fact-filled (so students could watch them and gain a basic understanding of the topic), short (so students would have a chance of watching it to the end) and funny (because life is too short to make boring videos!) My YouTube channel, RSin5orLess, will continue to act as a revision aid once ‘normal schooling’ returns, whenever that will be, as well as a reminder that necessity is the mother of invention. And that I’m bad at accents.

Engaging pupils can be a challenge in Religious and Moral Education (RME). Pupils can arrive with preconceptions of our subject based on a range of external influences.

I would like to give an overview of how I use thematic units to develop skills and engage learners.

In the last academic year, we worked on redeveloping elements of the Broad General Education (S1-3) courses for RME. The main area of my focus was S1 (equivalent to KS3).

Embedding skills for learning, life and work became central to the development of the new and revised units (in line with school improvement priorities). After our introduction to RME through Ultimate Questions, pupils explored a research skills mini-unit based on in-class and at-home activities that focussed on teaching the skills of research, using sources, analysis, and evaluation.

To follow this, it was decided to try a thematic approach for the S1 classes and seek to develop these skills further and introduce Beliefs and Values & Issues across different religious and non-religious viewpoints.

USING…Thematic Units.

Normally, we do not begin to use thematic units until S3 (KS4) and these focus on moral issues, however this new work sought to try a thematic unit from the start of the Secondary RME experience and use it to explore both issues of belief and issues of morality. The unit would be: Who Am I? The Human Condition – the broad scope of the unit was to explore beliefs about The Soul, the Nature of Human Beings, and Responses to Suffering.

TO DEVELOP…Skills.

I was keen to use this as an opportunity to further develop on the previous intensive research skills unit, in order to consolidate the pupils’ confidence in these skills. As we explored the content of the unit we made use of a variety of Making Thinking Visible thinking routines (already being used across the school), Co-operative Learning strategies (in order to provide structure and social skills development to our group and paired work), and Active Learning activities (in order to engage learners), with all these supporting the development of higher order thinking skills.

AS A RESULT…Engaging Learners.

In order to make learning relevant to pupils, I ensured the unit was broken down into small chunks, clearly linking lessons, and identifying contemporary moral issues that were relevant to each lesson.

As we explored the nature of human beings, we introduced debate around the environment and climate change; through teachings about responses to suffering, we explored racism and then poverty and injustice.

Pupils, through short focussed lessons, were engaging with sources that included Plato, Holy Scriptures from Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, and photo journalism. Throughout this unit they explored issues of belief, values and issues, consequences of beliefs, and began to express their own opinion with supporting reasons on the relationship between values and actions.

The result of this thematic approach to learning in S1 was a cohort of pupils who were more engaged in their learning than they were in subsequent single religion units or single-issue units. The pupils were able to demonstrate their progress toward the four capacities in Scottish education (for pupils to become Responsible Citizens, Successful Learners, Effective Contributors, and Confident Individuals). The quality of written answers were higher and more fully developed than in the previous year at this stage due to pupil interest and their ability to connect beliefs to issues. Feedback from pupils in their end of year evaluation has shown how they have appreciated dipping in and out of different religions and relating the beliefs to the world around them.

What is a ‘Specialist Leader of Education (SLE)?’ This is a question I have been asked dozens of times by both teaching and non-teaching friends and family. The role of an SLE is often not clearly defined and can be easily misunderstood, so in this blog I am hoping to answer that question, and also explore how SLEs can support the provision of RE across a Teaching School Alliance.

The DfE has defined SLEs as “experienced middle or senior leaders interested in supporting middle and senior leaders in other schools”. The impression I get is that even when schools employed ‘Advanced Skills Teachers’, there were varied examples of how these teachers were used, often with mixed degrees of success. The vision that I want to communicate in this blog post is that there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to being an SLE, and hopefully I can give some ideas as to how this might look. I think that the role can be defined by three Cs: collaboration, communication and context.

Let’s start with the first of our Cs: collaboration. When I was asked to put together this “How I…” blog, my initial reaction was to ask to change the title to “How we…”. I think that the days when an SLE will swoop in to provide the expertise to save the day for a failing teacher or department are gone. The absolute key to this role is empowering others to make positive change. Expertise does not just lie with an SLE, but with every single teacher of RE across every Alliance school. My role is to tap into this expertise and allow schools to work in a more joined-up way to share key ideas coherently.

In this situation an SLE is primarily a leader, someone who may have expertise but also the qualities to inspire change by developing the abilities of others. Coaching and mentoring can play a very important role in this school-to-schools support that SLEs can offer.

The second of our Cs is communication: this is vitally important in many different ways. Without a structure of communication, it is impossible for SLEs to offer any kind of lasting, meaningful collaboration between different schools across their TSA. One way of creating effective communication is the use of regular teach-meet style events. As a group of RE teachers we usually meet within our Alliance hub once a term. The purpose of this can be to share resources or subject and pedagogical knowledge. As an SLE it is my role to facilitate this session: this sometimes involves me delivering ideas myself, but often also involves me leaning on the shared expertise of others. To ensure this contact is ongoing, and not just once a term, we use Google classroom as a dialogue stream and a platform to continued sharing.

Context, the last of our Cs, is arguably the most important aspect of an SLE’s role. At the Chiltern Teaching School Alliance in Bedfordshire where I work, we serve a wide variety of schools. Our Luton schools have a large majority of Muslim pupils, whereas our Central Bedfordshire schools have a higher proportion of non-religious and Christian pupils. This is important because teaching RE in these different contexts carries its own sensitivities and challenges. In order to understand these contexts, the best thing an SLE can do is speak to the teachers from that school – in this situation they are the experts because they work within these particular settings on a daily basis. SLEs can also reach out to local community and religious groups to bring these contexts into greater focus thus enabling better support.

Being an SLE is a job that I truly enjoy. The reward is enabling the provision of high-quality RE, which undoubtedly benefits all. I hope that some of the ideas in this article are useful. If you would like to ask any questions, feel free to contact me on twitter (@AdamHoldsworth1) or email me (aholdsworth@denbighhigh.co.uk).

Or

‘How to build team virtually during the Covid-19 pandemic’

I’m passionate about team!! Team is one of the essential ways in which we live out the values of our Trust. So, I wanted to explore how we could build team virtually? As an office team we have had virtual ‘non-work’ coffee mornings as well as business catch ups, we are also using Whats App and Team chat a bit more, but I wanted something a bit different. This was when the Virtual Bake-Off idea was born…. How would our office team and consultants represent the Trust through baking? The results blew me away!!!

The Soda Bread: Kevin connected his ingredients with each member of the team. Here he explains….

The Organic wholewheat flour, full of goodness, which is the basis of everything – this is Deborah.

The extra-virgin olive oil, reputed in Castillo de Locubin to fix any kind of problem – this is Tracey.

The milled omega seeds giving golden sunshine to the texture – this is Kate.

The walnuts contributing dry, deep integrity – this is Dave.

A shot of espresso for a burst of energy this is our social media consultant

12-year-old malt whisky, seasoned, matured, with strong regional associations – this is John, our Chair of Trustees

Bicarbonate of soda – this is me (Kevin!) – just because I couldn’t face comparing anyone else to bicarbonate of soda!

The skilled presentation of the whole product on beautiful plates – this is Kathryn, orchestrating everything and acting as CSTG’s public face.

The Fruit Cake: Tracey’s fruitcake was based on the Trust values. This is what she said about it.

Collaboration – Fruit, works better together. Whole is greater than the sum of its parts

Openness – No hidden ingredients

Stewardship – Low cost simple ingredients transformed into a beautiful cake

Integrity – Traditional recipe, long slow cooking

Empowerment – cranberries added, which are said to be a super food

Service – What is a cake if not for sharing with others?

The Pavlova: Deborah’s pavlova was full of fresh cream and fruit, as the Trust is currently overflowing with fresh and fruitful ideas. The trust brings organisations together in partnership. We’re greater and can do more together than as individual organisations. Likewise, the individual components forming the pavlova are greater together. Each of the components’ initial letters together can spell CSTG (Cream, Strawberries, Tangerines, Grapes) and Religion and Worldviews Education (Raspberries, Whites of Egg). Deborah didn’t want to waste eggs and wanted to ensure the best outcome, so she outsourced for the best skills and expertise – buying the meringue is from Waitrose and getting her family to help  put it together!

The Florentines: I made some Florentines with Kellogg Crunchy Nut cornflakes as our office in Oxford is in Kellogg College. They contain Chocolate, Sultanas, Toblerone and Glace Cherries spelling out CSTG. I used an unusual, colourful and vibrant mix of ingredients – like our amazing team. They were bound together by condensed milk. This product has longevity and is an important ingredient in many different desserts, just like CSTG. Lastly, and more practically I planned in advance to use no flour and eggs as it was possible these may be unavailable!

The Train: Kate made a train as Culham St Gabriel’s is going places. There is space for all sorts of people. We are on a journey together. The wheels are love hearts to show our positive message!

The Fat-Free Cake: Dave decided to create a Fat-Free cake. He says, ‘At the moment this is a Slimming World house – No cake making due to being supportive… If I buy a cake and present it, how does someone learn or personalise it? At CSTG we like to facilitate ways in which people can take their own cake journey – we signpost recipes, encourage sharing, research flavour combinations, explore cultural cake advice and engage in high level cake research which hopefully benefits our core cake audience. However, I did buy a cake or some rocky road bites – I also found a recipe and would encourage people to push the boundaries and personalise it – at RE:ONLINE we would ask bakers to let us know how they got on – could you blog about it? Rocky road – symbolically, it’s a rocky time and we are with you on your own rocky road– encourage people to take a recipe and make it their own – be inspired by and look to inspire others. Jaffa cakes – to show inclusion and to not shy away from controversy – Is it a cake? Is it a biscuit? Let us look at both sides and make a justified decision’. So instead of eating cake, Dave has produced a fantastic cake knowledge organiser with a religion and worldviews twist which you can download here. Of course, this is a bit of fun for you to enjoy over a coffee break, not to be taught in the classroom!

The bitesize snack: Our social media consultant also teaches full time, so she brought a bitesize snack which provided energy and quick nutrition like our social media and RE:ONLINE!

What a great team! No more words…

With huge thanks to:

Deborah Elwine, our Office and Operations Manager

Tracey Francis, our Data and Online Manager

Kevin O’Grady, our Lead Consultant for Research

Kate Christopher, our Lead Consultant for Teach:RE

Dave Rees, our Lead Consultant for RE:ONLINE

Our social media consultant

As a department, we have been trialling the use of knowledge quizzes with A level classes.  This blog will look to set out why we use them, how they are structured and the benefits we have found in their implementation.

Why we use knowledge quizzes with our A level students? 

Upon first glance at an RE A-level specification, the amount of content we need to cover in such little time is daunting.  Whilst we spend plenty of time considering how best to explore these ideas with our students, we felt that we had not spent enough time reflecting upon how best to assess the students’ understanding of the material we covered.

In previous years, we would have finished a unit of work by setting an essay question based on the topic.  However, we came to recognise that during the marking of essays, we would spend copious amounts of time dealing with knowledge errors within essays.  Whilst we would often use low stakes quizzes at the start of a lesson, we wanted to create a form of assessment at the end of the topic which would assess students’ understanding of the core knowledge within the unit before we proceeded to tackle an essay question.

How are they structured?

Here are the sections from a knowledge quiz set on the OCR topic of Ancient philosophical influences.  It would be the first knowledge test which Year 12 students would complete.  With future quizzes, each section may contain questions based upon a mix of topics.  This cumulative element would ensure that students are constantly revisiting prior material.

The quiz would start with asking students to define three key terms from the current topic.

Multiple-choice questions are a really useful tool in identifying any misconceptions students may have. When creating these multiple-choice questions, it is essential that they are rigorous and diagnostic.  These multiple-choice questions might be based on key terms, scholars or ideas students have explored in the topic.

These short recall questions allow students to elaborate further on core knowledge within the topic.

A longer explanation question allows students to demonstrate more in-depth understanding of core knowledge.

The final section of the quiz allows students to evaluate key ideas within the topic.  These points of evaluation are taken from the discussion points within the OCR A level specification for each topic.

As students to progress throughout the course, these knowledge quizzes could be expanded in various ways to assess core knowledge.  These include:

• Timelines to sort scholars into chronological order
• An extract from a philosophical or Biblical text which students have to summarise
• Providing a relevant quote to support a specific idea or scholar.

Here is one example taken from a knowledge quiz on the Developments in Christian Thought topic Death and the Afterlife:

In addition, as students progress throughout the course and we have taught essay writing knowledge quizzes can be used to assess their disciplinary knowledge in ways such as:

• Students selecting the best opening sentence for a paragraph in response to specific essay question
• Students selecting the grammatically correct sentence
• Asking students to highlight any structural errors within a paragraph

How are we using these knowledge quizzes?

We plan to use these knowledge quizzes at the end of each A-level unit prior to students completing an essay on the topic.  In addition, we have implemented them as part of our Year 12 mock exam.  In the past, the Year 12 Philosophy mock exam would have consisted of a choice of four essay questions with students answering three questions.  However, discussions with the rest of my department suggested that our traditional form of assessment for a mock exam may not be best for long term learning or provide us with a full picture of their knowledge of content covered prior to sitting the mock exam.

Firstly, students may have only completed a small amount of essay questions prior to this exam.  The task of completing three essay questions within timed conditions is something which they would not be suitably prepared for. Prior to them sitting the exam, we can already anticipate that some students may not complete all three questions within time allowed.  Secondly, this traditional form of assessment does not allow us to check the students’ understanding of the full breadth of A-level specification which they have covered prior to this exam.  Therefore, we included several knowledge quizzes within their mock exam as well as asking students to answer one essay question.

What are the benefits of using knowledge quizzes with A-level students?

From implementing knowledge quizzes within A-level teaching, we have seen various benefits for students and teachers:

• Quick to mark – usually 10/15 minutes per quiz
• Allows for assessment of more aspects of a specification than an essay question
• Allows students to check their understanding of a topic before preparing for an essay question
• Cumulative element allows students to constantly revisit prior material.

“FEEDBACK” A word used near continuously in my school setting for the last couple of years. We have attended feedback conferences, held staff meetings, changed processes and discussed with parents. But, almost all of the conversations we have are around feedback for learning and progress in English and Maths.

“ASSESSMENT” A word that invariably comes up in every single staff meeting or local network session for RE I have taken part in. Despite often feeling quite daunted or negative about assessment processes in RE, there is no doubt teachers are consumed by the need for guidance and clarity on the issue of how we assess RE learning effectively in our classrooms.

So quite recently I have tried to join the dots and try out some of the great ideas on effective feedback for learning, to support a more useful system for assessment in RE. Despite the fact that there is definitely a place for summative judgements and recording of progress is still required for most of us in primary RE, unsurprisingly many teachers would agree the most effective tool in assessment for learning in RE is formative assessment. Just as we do confidently in English and Maths, we must identify what the key objective for learning is in an RE session and identify how we will know what the children have achieved and where to take them next.

The starting point must be a clear long/medium term aim. This may well be a strong question for enquiry, forming the learning journey for a given unit of work. Then, clear steps must be in place for how pupils will travel along this pathway. For some, this might include a knowledge organiser or other planning document to identify factual knowledge, questions for discussion and resources/content to build up to answering the question. Maintaining this focus throughout the unit of work is key, in order not to attempt to drown the children in unnecessary content along the way.

Then in each session, a key skill, piece of knowledge or question can be focused upon. A decision can be made on how we will know how pupils have done today. This might be reflection on a piece of writing (not necessarily marking of it though…a discussion for another day); notes on group or class discussions; quizzes or exit tickets; thought bubbles or creative work – the possibilities are endless. The teacher can take the work, books, tickets etc and quickly judge what each pupil has achieved today. Work can be grouped, names highlighted on a list, or quick notes made on a planner. Now we decide what is needed next – content of the next lesson, continuation of the piece of work, or  questions tailored to each of the groups. Planning next steps is responsive to the feedback given by the pupils today, and we offer feedback to them through the expectation and planning of the next session.

Most of these ideas seem so obvious, because as teachers we are skilled already in assessing learning continuously and deciding what to do next. But, my experience of conversations with subject leaders and classroom teachers of primary RE is that we rarely consider transferring these skills into RE. I hope in reading these suggestions, more who haven’t yet considered these approaches might try and simplify their content and apply what they are already so good at, instead of worrying unnecessarily about time consuming and often unhelpful summative systems of assessment for RE.