Phew! And relax.

It's been another long, hard and exciting year with seemingly very little time to take care of non urgent business. Now the summer holidays have arrived, we can take stock, reflect and do a bit of much needed housekeeping at PhotoPedagogy Towers.

You may have noticed that the website is getting a slight facelift. Here are some of the changes we've made:

• The homepage is more visual with (a lot) less text. A grid of hyperlinked images highlights particular resources on the site.
• For those wishing to know a bit more about PhotoPedagogy, the old homepage is now an About page and sits underneath the new Home page with an invitation to Contribute to the site.
• The Threshold Concepts now have their own place in the menu and are, hopefully, easier to find and use.
• Some of the older Resources have been retired. If you really miss something, let us know and we'll reinstate it.
• The Lesson Plans have now been subdivided into KS3/4 and Post 16. We've removed reference to GCSE and A-level, since students and teachers of other courses (such as BTECs) in this country and abroad might also find the resources useful. These pages also look a bit different.

Finally, we've  sorted out some of the less obvious, niggling design details, such as colour consistency, across the site. As always, the website is a work in progress.

​Thanks to everyone who has contacted us over the last two days, whilst we were moving stuff around, to ask about the location of missing pages or dead links. If only we were professional web designers we'd have made all the changes without you even noticing, but we're not. Hopefully, most things are back where you might expect them to be now. If you spot anything weird or missing, please let us know!

In other news, we've had some really exciting discussions with various friends in the photography world outside schools in the last few weeks. Here's a short summary of those conversations:

The folks at pic.london have been in touch and we're hoping to support them with a workshop at their next big photography event sometime in 2019.

We have begun planning our next 2 day CPD session for Tate Exchange, working closely with Autograph ABP and The Photographers' Gallery. As soon as we have confirmed dates and details, you'll be the first to know but, at the moment, the plan is to hold an event similar to last year's during the first two days of the February half term (18 and 19 February 2019).

We've been invited by Photoworks to run a session for teachers at this year's Brighton Photography Biennial. This will take place on Saturday 29 September, the opening weekend of the event. Here are the details in case you're interested in getting involved:

We're really excited about all these opportunities to meet colleagues, share ideas and discuss the state of play in photography education. We hope you like the changes to the website.

​We'd like to thank everyone for your support this year and wish you a very happy summer holiday. We look forward to working with you again in September!

Best wishes,
​Jon & Chris

To be honest, I've never been a very big fan of lesson plans. This is a bit ironic given that we decided to call the set of resources on this website Lesson Plans. Of course, they aren't really lesson plans at all but schemes of work or sets of provocations with accompanying resources. I do plan all my lessons but I rarely teach from a set Scheme of Work and, as an incessant tweaker, I enjoy the process of designing lessons from scratch each week (not the most efficient practice I agree). Nevertheless, I base these lessons on an over-arching Programme of Study which enables me to stick to an agreed timetable of structured activities and largely prevents my colleagues tearing their hair out with frustration.

This year, with the various changes to subject specifications, we at Tallis were asked  to revisit our Programmes of Study at KS4 and 5 ensuring that they were fit for purpose. In an earlier post, I described why we made the decision in the visual arts to go linear. We no longer offer the AS qualification in photography or art. This summer has felt quite different with only the A2 students being moderated. This meant that we needed a Programme of Study that would sustain students for two years, support those who arrived in Year 12 with little experience of the subject but also stretch and challenge those who had done GCSE photography and needed to move on quickly.

The structure we were given by senior leaders for our new Programmes of Study was as follows:

Regular readers and NSEAD members will know about the thinking we've done this year here at PhotoPedagogy Towers about Threshold Concepts for Photography, a version of which has appeared in AD magazine. We think Threshold Concepts are important because they identify the big ideas in our subjects. We think it's important for colleagues to debate and determine these big ideas, separate from Assessment Objectives and the whims of the incumbent Secretary of State. In short, Threshold Concepts are what we (as professional teachers) agree are the foundational ideas in our various disciplines. "Powerful Knowledge" is Professor Michael Young's phrase and describes an order of knowledge that is different to the everyday wisdom brought to schools by young people. It is a controversial term, in some respects, since it contains an implicit criticism of what has been termed "progressive" approaches to education. However, my Head co-authored the book 'Knowledge and the Future School' with Professor Young so it's no surprise that "Powerful Knowledge" appears in our new Programmes of Study document! Whilst I'm not convinced about the term itself, (what is powerless knowledge?) I support the notion that disciplinary knowledge (the kind we get when we are taught subjects) is an important element in education and students can benefit from being explicitly taught stuff and thinking hard about it. There is then a direct link with threshold concepts - those troublesome nuggets of complex knowledge that take a while to assimilate and 'master'. We might call this the Content of the curriculum, although in a subject like photography or art this is often quite a complex issue. Finally, we have "Fundamental Skills". If "Powerful Knowledge" is the Knowing What, "Fundamental Skills" are the Knowing How. For us, this includes not only procedural issues (processes/techniques) such 'How to make a cyanotype' but also connects with intellectual skills like 'How to conduct strategic research' and our Habits of Mind (e.g. 'How to stick with difficulty').

We've been hard at work for the last couple of years testing a variety of mini projects with Year 12 students. Many of these have been shared in the Lesson Plans section of this website. In the last couple of weeks we have begun to shape our new Programme of Study. As always we've written it in Googledocs so we can keep it as a live document, editing, tweaking, adjusting collaboratively as we go. We are happy to share the document with other colleagues outside school, knowing how valuable it is to connect with professionals in other contexts and with different experiences and expertise to our own. This is what the first half term looks like:

Here's a link to the whole document. It's very much a work in progress so please forgive any typos and don't be surprised if it continues to change over the coming weeks. Our plan is to have something that we are pleased with by the end of term.

Hopefully, you can see how the three elements knit together: Powerful Knowledge, Threshold Concepts and Key Skills. In terms of the two year programme it breaks down like this:

Autumn 1 - An introduction: What is photography? Mini projects begin.
Autumn 2 - Mini projects continue, each dealing with a specific historical/contextual issue and giving students opportunities to develop their own work in response. Objective vs Subjective approaches to photography.
Spring 1 - Photo Exchange and the beginning of the extended Photobook project.
Spring 2 - Photobook project continues, the launchpad for the Personal Investigation.
Summer 1 - Personal Investigation continues, supplemented by occasional provocations E.g. Inside /Outside, Mirrors or Windows? etc.
Summer 2  - Personal Investigation continues.
Autumn 1 - Personal Investigation continues.
Autumn 2 - Personal Investigation continues. Students begin finalising their responses and pulling together their accompanying essays.
Spring 1 - Personal Investigation concludes. Component 2 The Externally Set Task begins (1st Feb)
Spring 2 - The Externally Set Task continues
Summer 1 - The Externally Set Task concludes (shortly after Easter)

The first two terms of Year 12 give us an opportunity to tackle the notion of photography in terms of relative objectivity and subjectivity. Alongside an introduction to the chemical darkroom as a kind of experimental space, where the magic of light can be observed and captured, we attempt to juxtapose the Modernist tradition (straight, objective, documentary) of photography with approaches that celebrate photography's ability to represent subjective experience. We also attempt to tackle issues surrounding the ethics of photography and an awareness of the difference between photography as art and all the many forms of photography that belong to other domains - the law, medicine, surveillance, war etc. We hope that an awareness of the history and theory of photography (still hotly contested) will help students see their own work in context.

We are live testing this type of structure with our current Year 12 students and making tweaks to the Programme based on what we have learned with them. So far, the basic structure seems to have worked well, giving students a good grounding in the subject (without the distraction of the AS exam) and allowing them to develop their own practice and interests. We are particularly pleased with the Photobook project. It has been a great platform on which students can build a sense of themselves as photographers and thus confidently begin the fully assessed Personal Investigation. It also means that each student is responsible for defining the nature of their own investigation through an authentic process of research and practice.

Here are just a few examples of selected pages from Year 12 photobooks: