My Nigel Grezley moment: vocab at scale

Every fortnight, I commute from Leeds to Kings Cross to meet with colleagues. On the way home, I walk past an intriguing-looking statue and always think he must have been an important chap, and always try to remember his name.

I'd been doing this since August, and despite my best efforts, I hadn't been able to recall it.

Why? Life!

It wasn't until I thought about making some kind of arbitrary connection that it clicked. I didn't even need to cheat to write this post! Nigel Grezley was an enormously important engineer. I remembered it not just by sheer force of will, but by seeing if I could link 'Grez' to 'graze' in my mind, and the first time I managed to remember the name, I must admit I smiled to myself. But then it made me think about all these seemingly irrelevant pieces of information that pupils have to master day in and day out of their school lives.

I've spent lots of time thinking about moving concepts into long-term memory this year. We know that the following works:

1. Chunking: Breaking down information into smaller, manageable parts.
2. Distributed Practice: Spacing out learning sessions over time.
3. Encoding: Converting data into knowledge-based structures.
4. Storage: Storing information in different brain areas.
5. Retrieval: Recalling and using stored information effectively.

Look at the amount of concepts that pupils need to learn across the curriculum; for example in geography, maths and history (range of exam boards here). Surely school leaders must ask themselves: how on earth do we select, sequence, teach and identify knowledge gaps in nine or ten subjects? Even before that, how do you manage this for the 50,000 words that pupils need in order to unlock the doors they need by the age of 16?

In the course of my time at Bedrock, I've learned about the research that underpins everything- in the tier 2 and 3 aspects of the platform. If nothing else, this is the essence of what we spend our time talking to schools about; we'll even triangulate your outcomes against engagement to demonstrate impact. If you'd like to read about the science of Bedrock (narration, synonym/antonym, scaffolded writing, image exercises), I've written about it here and focussed specifically on disciplinary literacy here. My conversation about discplinary literacy with the brilliant Mark Miller is also here.

When Olivia Sumpter and I set out to build our Teaching & Learning Team, Olivia began by asking about schools' pain points and, fundamentally, how we could address these. All our processes are focused on helping schools meet their pupils' needs at scale. And I know for a fact that my colleague Ellie Ashton spends her time doing nothing else other than listening to schools and their learners about how we keep getting better.

Many have messaged me to discuss how we can work together- please get in touch; I'd love to hear from you!