Activities to Promote Depth of Knowledge!

What does mastery and depth of knowledge actually look like and how can we promote it in a fun and engaging ways? To put it short, children should have a solid understanding of what they have learnt and be able to recall facts, use skills and understand concepts permanently. To allow children to develop this solid understanding, children should be using and applying and evaluating their learning. Here are our top 5 activities to promote mastery skills and deepen understanding in your classroom!

Fake Marking

Let the children become the teacher and mark some work. Provide the children with a piece of work full of errors and misconceptions that a child who has a solid understanding will spot. Give time for the children to mark the work and explain what errors and have been made and make suggestions for improvements.
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A list of inaccurate maths calculations or a poor piece of writing make great fake marking activities and assesses children on their identification of common misconceptions.

Show Learning In A Different Way

Once a child has completed an activity or you believe they have a good understanding, give them an opportunity to show their learning in a different way. In Maths, children can move from completing calculations to representing the calculations with pictures or concrete materials. By providing different types of resources (counters and cubes etc) you are giving children a chance to show their learning in a variety of contexts. In English, asking children to re-write a paragraph for a slightly different purpose will allow you to assess if they have mastered the skills taught and can adapt the skills for different purposes.

Justify and Reason

Reasoning questions are always a simple way to challenge children to justify their answers using what they have learnt. I wrote a whole other blog about this with loads of great reasoning style questions that can be used across the curriculum. However, some simple ideas include asking 'What if' questions. After a child has been learning about habitats and adaptations in Science, you may ask, 'What if polar bears suddenly found themselves living in a jungle, how might they evolve?' This will allow children to show their deep understanding by making predictions. Challenges using 'same or different' ask children to compare different concepts using their learning. For example, in geography, you may ask 'Brazil and Mexico: same of different?' The class would then use their learning of the locations to compare what is same and different about the two places.

Expert Teacher

This is such a simple idea. If a child has shown a good understanding of what they have learnt, pass them a badge and a-point them as the expert learner.​ Their job is to move around the room and identify any misconceptions children are making and support them. They become an extra teacher in the classroom. By explaining and supporting others, they will naturally deepen their own learning Particularly if they have to explain the same concept in a number of ways to different children.

​Create Top Tips

Allow the children to become advisers, once they have grasped a new skill. Ask the children, if they were teaching this skill to someone else, what would they say are the top tips and what are the common mistakes they would warn them about. This task again, encourages children to evaluate their learning and think about what common mistakes might be made and evaluate the most challenging parts of the learning. If the children are aware of common errors, they are much less likely to make them yourself.