What a half term! I don’t know about you, but I feel it has been an extremely busy and tiring one. Parents’ evenings, marking assessments, waiting in anticipation for the government’s announcement on 7th Feb and to top it all off, Ofsted’s desire that we should know of and use four very important words.
As many of you will be thinking and have mentioned in passing, shouldn’t our teaching do the talking? Isn’t that what matters? Surely, that makes sense.
However, having attended our department meeting on Tuesday evening, it was clear that these are words which Ofsted really seem to care about. Whilst sitting in the meeting, I thought I really need to get my head round some of these words and so I proceeded to spend some time looking into and researching them. It took a little while and so I decided it would be nice to write a blog, a quick guide to these words with examples, in order to save everyone’s time.
So here we are! A quick guide to the four aspects of knowledge, with some brief examples. I have done my best to make this a quick read for staff, however please do feel free to email me or Adam Hutchinson if you have any questions.
So, what are the four aspects of knowledge in question? Substantive, Disciplinary, Composite and Component.
Substantive and Disciplinary Knowledge
I am going to begin with Substantive and Disciplinary Knowledge. These can be seen as inter-linked aspects of knowledge. Let’s have a look at what they mean.
Substantive
According to the Chartered College of Teaching, substantive knowledge is ‘the content that teachers teach as established fact’ (Counsell, 2018).
Here are some examples of substantive knowledge:
· Properties of materials
· Rules of netball
· Pythagoras’ theorem
· Events leading up to World War One
· The plot of Romeo and Juliet
It is the knowledge that students gain in subjects and can be referred to as ‘content’ knowledge. These can include certain concepts, words, dates, formulae, equations and so on.
The idea behind this is that ‘substantive knowledge, when it connects to more substantive knowledge, creates understanding.’ (Green, 2017).
Disciplinary
Disciplinary knowledge, on the other hand, is more thinking about how we have come to a certain conclusion or fact. It is ‘a curricular term for what pupils learn about how that knowledge was established, its degree of certainty and how it continues to be revised by scholars’ (Counsell, 2018).
Here are some examples of disciplinary knowledge:
How historians come to conclusions and judgements
Carrying out an experiment
Writing persuasively
When looking at the above definitions, it could be said that this is knowledge we use every day. A good example I came across was that of a TV remote.
Think back to when your TV remote last stopped working. First you banged it, then you wiped the sensor, finally you changed the battery. Each time you changed one variable (the independent variable) before measuring its effect (the dependent variable) whilst keeping everything else the same (the control variables); you see, science is useful! (Green, 2017).
You could say that each subject is based around this idea of disciplinary knowledge:
“For each subject is just that: a product and an account of an ongoing truth quest, whether through empirical testing in science, argumentation in philosophy/history, logic in mathematics or beauty in the arts. It describes that part of the curriculum where pupils learn about the conditions under which valid claims can be made, and associated conventions such as what constitutes evidence or argument in that subject.” (Counsell, 2018).
Figure 1 below outlines features of both Substantive and Disciplinary knowledge:
What is important to remember is that these terms (substantive and disciplinary) can have different names depending on the Curriculum Research Reviews for your subject (if there is one).
Component and Composite Knowledge
This brings us to component and composite knowledge. Once again, these concepts are inter-linked and are aspects of knowledge we engage in with our classes on a daily basis. The only difference is, they have now been labelled as the above terms.
According to a glossary provided to Ofsted inspectors in 2018, here are the definitions for component and composite knowledge:
Components: Are the building blocks that have been identified as the most useful for subsequent learning.
Composite: Is the complex activity / skill /performance the components will combine to achieve.
(Junior School Collaboration, 2018).
It seems like these are basically terms to outline the process of learning. In order for students to complete a certain task (Composite), they need to have certain skills (Components) they have learnt to be able to do this.
The example below shows this quite nicely:
(Burchall, 2021)
Based on the example above, a composite is a task/activity made up of several parts or components. These can be with a single task in a lesson, such as a singing a large number of songs. Alternatively, it can be a topic in your curriculum (composite) of which the components are the lessons you teach to build an overall understanding about the topic. For example, in History we spend around 6 weeks focusing on the topic of Henry VIII and why he broke away from the Catholic church (composite). The components would be the 6 weeks worth of lessons that are taught to build an overall view and understanding of this topic, which the students will ultimately be asked to answer an essay question on. We therefore sequence components to build composites.
‘The components are the smaller building blocks of learning and they come together to form a composite, which is a bigger block of learning’ (Gaze, 2022).
Marina Gaze, Deputy Director for FE and Skills at Ofsted also mentions the example below, which I felt was a particularly good one:
“So let me give you an example. If you’re training hairdressers and you want them to be able to do some sort of complex geometric haircut, I’m not a hairdressing expert, but my guess is that you wouldn’t start them off on a complicated geometric haircut on a real client. You would start off by teaching your learners how to hold a pair of scissors correctly and how to cut hair in a straight line on the block. And you would build up what your learners can do week in week out, until they’re confident with the basics and can move on to the more complicated haircuts.
So that’s what we’re talking about there, you don’t start off with the hard stuff. You think about what some of the easier, smaller blocks are first and the sequence in which you might need to teach those. Generally, I guess you probably think about doing health and safety first, certainly if your learners are going to go on to use tools or equipment that are possibly dangerous.”
In terms of thinking about how these relate to our disciplines, the Figures below (2, 3 and 4) illustrate Composite and Component knowledge with a focus on Maths.
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4
As you can see from Figure 4, in order to work out which of these fractions is not equivalent to ¼ (composite) it is important for students to have an understanding of various mathematical skills/rules (components) to be able to answer the question.
I hope this article has been useful to staff and helped to explain the four types of knowledge. Please do feel free to email me (m.quraishi@crgs.org.uk) if you have any questions.
Written by Mehreen Quraishi, Learning and Teaching
References:
Burchall, J. (2021). Ofsted early education update (early years providers) Summer 2021. Available: https://theofstedbigconversation.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Ofsted-presentation-Ofsted-early-education-update-early-years-providers-Summer-2021.pdf. Last accessed 9th Feb 2022.
Counsell, C. (2018). Taking curriculum seriously. Available: https://my.chartered.college/impact_article/taking-curriculum-seriously/. Last accessed 9th Feb 2022.
Gaze, M. (2022). Intent, Implementation and Impact with Marina Gaze. Available: https://cognassist.com/videos/intent-implementation-and-impact-with-marina-gaze-video/. Last accessed 9th Feb 2022.
Green, J. (2017). Building a great curriculum - what knowledge do we need?. Available: https://arkonline.org/blog/building-great-curriculum-what-knowledge-do-we-need. Last accessed 9th Feb 2022.
Junior School Collaboration. (2018). OFSTED Inspector training Autumn 2018 - Assessment reflections. Available: https://www.juniorschoolcollaboration.co.uk/news/detail/ofsted-inspector-training-autumn-2018-assessment-r/. Last accessed 9th Feb 2022.
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