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:

Recent discourse in UK education has been shaped, in part, by the place of the arts in the curriculum. Should STEM become STEAM? Should the arts be relegated to extra-curricular, so that the 'core' or EBacc subjects can be given pride of place? These questions go right to the heart of what is valued in education. Phrases like 'mastery curriculum' and 'powerful knowledge' tend to emphasise cognitive ability and epistemic access over other forms of intelligence. 'Traditional' subjects and disciplinary knowledge are back in vogue, admired for their perceived rigour and foundations in the Enlightenment values of logic and rationality. 'Teaching' and 'research' also feature prominently in discussions about pedagogy. Alongside this is a new emphasis on character education, particularly notions of resilience and 'grit'. The world of education is often divided into the 'hard' and the 'soft' with no prizes for guessing which subjects are given time, resources and status.

Teachers of arts subjects, like photography, can consequently feel embattled, belittled and marginalised. What place does a subject like photography have in this brave new world of what works? What role does knowledge and cognitive ability have in photography? What are the particular affordances of photography? How might it develop a student's character? What do photography teachers teach? Is photography 'hard' or 'soft'? 

One of the ways we might want to theorise about teaching and learning in photography is by referring to various educational taxonomies. Our most recent addition to this website is a page devoted to Photo Literacy. It is a parallel development to our Threshold Concepts and related resources. Rather than viewing this as narrowly focused on language, we prefer to define Photo Literacy as follows:

It is precisely this combination of intelligences that makes photography such an important part of the curriculum. Photography students must find ways to combine their knowledge, technical understanding, imagination, physical and emotional control and personal values in order to succeed. In photography it is as important to feel empathy as it is to know about Depth of Field. Photographers need to develop a wide range of abilities from a variety of domains. They need to be good self-managers as well as collaborators. They need to understand the history of the medium as well as imagine their own contribution to its future. Teachers of photography are as interested in developing axiological (values) and ontological (orientation to the world) awareness as they in developing intellectual strength. This is real rigour.

By exploring the various taxonomies of learning we outline ways in which photography teachers can remind themselves (and others) of what and how students are being taught in their lessons. By deliberate questioning in lessons we can draw attention to this vast range of skills and abilities, making the implicit explicit.

There are certainly limitations to these taxonomies. They tend to suggest that learning is hierarchical - that students can't be creative, for example, until they have 'mastered' knowledge and understanding. It's important to be too literal in the interpretation of them. We are all aware that learning is complex, interwoven, iterative and cyclical in nature. We should not expect photography students to progress through the stages of Bloom's Cognitive Domain in any kind of logical sequence. We should not delay opportunities for students to be creative until we have instructed them in the whole history of photography. Likewise, an over-emphasis on writing or memorisation of facts, will not lead to greater Photo Literacy. We must resist attempts to limit photography. 

We must defend and celebrate the particular affordances of the visual, emphasise the importance of intuition, of feeling, of not knowing and unlearning. Students' breakthrough moments will be unpredictable. They may struggle with some aspects of the course (taking what seems like an inordinate amount of time to emerge from a particular threshold) but may take like ducks to water in other aspects of their programme of study. However, we hope that by outlining some of the ways in which educationalists have theorised about learning, by shining a light on taxonomies other than the cognitive, and by providing some ways in which teachers can use questioning and dialogue to draw out their students' learning, we can all better argue for our rightful place in the curriculum - right at the very heart!

​-- Jon Nicholls, Thomas Tallis School