Much of the job of a teacher is identifying barriers to learning and then finding ways around - or demolishing - them. That’s not always easy and it can be particularly tough when the barriers to a task are multiple and varied.

One such task is accessing challenging texts. The long list of potential hurdles includes vocabulary knowledge, historical understanding and comprehension skills, to name but three.

Laura May Rowlands set out to address this problem with her English classes and found some success with “front loading”. She explains how it works and how it is opening up new worlds to the young people at her school.

How common is it that a student will struggle to access a text?

As a subject leader in English, I know some students are not ready to access the powerful texts I want them to know, analyse, evaluate and grow richer from.

Whether this gap stems from reading ability, cultural capital or contextual and historical understanding, there will be haves and have-nots. The renowned educator ED Hirsch sums it up with his observation that “it takes knowledge to gain knowledge”.

A friend recently shared with me a copy of Ted Hughes’ poem Bayonet Charge, in which she had highlighted all the words her students didn’t know.

In addition to the expected unusual vocabulary (such as “raw-seamed hot khaki” and “the patriotic tear that had brimmed in his eye”), many needed instruction on the meaning of seemingly common words, such as “stumbling”, “lugged” and “molten”.

The way to level the playing field here seems obvious: it’s about building word power. But there is more to it.

Could you give an example?

As a student at an all-girls’ convent school in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I studied Sonnet 43 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In reading this, we needed no instruction on the meaning of the religious imagery; we had that cultural capital at our fingertips from the obligatory RE lessons and Catholic values of the school.

But when I first taught that poem at my current, non-denominational school, I quickly became unstuck as I realised that I needed to unpick the imagery and explain it. I had failed to anticipate this gap.

As a sea of nonplussed faces gazed back at me, I knew that I was doing a disservice to students by expecting them to grasp the meaning of the poem, the nuances of the language choices and the cultural references all in the space of a 50-minute lesson. That had to change.

What did you decide to do?

What I did not do was pick “easier” texts. Teachers have a moral duty to provide all students with the best of what has been thought and written. Instead, I made it a mission to “front load” the knowledge that students needed in order to make sense of what they were reading.

This was a lengthy process: for each text we had to break down the components of what was needed to make effective inferences.

Could you explain the process?

Take the poem War Photographer, on the GCSE literature specification. On the face of it, this seems to be a fairly straightforward poem, with little in the way of challenging language. Yet, on deeper analysis, there are many layers to unpick.

In the opening stanza, the “darkroom” is discussed: will students know, for example, how photographs were developed in the pre-digital age?

It later lists “Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh”. Can students identify these places on a map? Do they know the significance of the conflicts that happened there?

Arming students with this powerful understanding before they attack the analysis of the poem itself means their inferences will be richer and much more considered.

How does this work at a curriculum level?

Each unit of work in our curriculum is now structured in booklet format, with the pre-reading and vocabulary explicitly set out.

Students are also reminded of where they have encountered key concepts in earlier years and have the booklet on hand to remind themselves.

By adopting a standard approach to the knowledge we want students to gain, we ensure that the playing field is as level as we can make it.

Of course, some of the material we want students to know stretches over a wide domain. In introducing Year 10 to A Christmas Carol, I devote an entire term to a unit on Victorian injustice, spending many weeks building students’ knowledge of the Victorian era as well as the themes of social injustice, redemption and Gothic tropes.

Then, when we study the text in its full glory, I don’t have to break off to explain what a pea-souper was, or why Bob Cratchit didn’t just quit and get another job.

We make a lot of use of maps, too, whether it’s to show the distance between Stratford-upon-Avon to London, to show where Henry V sailed from (our home town, Southampton) or to trace the route of the slave ships sailing to America.

I also looked to my colleagues in other subjects, finding out when students would be studying the Industrial Revolution in history to join up their thinking.

What impact has this approach had so far?

By anticipating and collating the knowledge we expect students to have in advance of attacking the text itself, we have made good gains. Students are reporting better understanding, and this is reflected in their retrieval activities and longer writing tasks.

Although we haven’t had official GCSE results in a year, our internal assessment data makes for pleasing reading.

What advice do you have for others looking to implement this method?

It does take careful thought. You have to choose and sequence the knowledge you want to front load, and in order to provide a level playing field to students that eliminates the Matthew effect [whereby the “academically rich” get richer and the poor get poorer], it’s vital that teachers are empowered to explicitly pre-teach the context and vocabulary needed, and unpack complexities.

Our students do not have an innate set of knowledge with which to make meaningful inferences. They cannot discover meaning when they are not provided with the tools of knowledge.

Front loading this, far from being stifling and spoiling the journey of a text, is empowering. It’s a moral responsibility for us, as teachers, to endow our students with the knowledge we have benefited from ourselves.

It is only by doing this that we have any hope of levelling the playing field and providing equity to our students.

Laura May Rowlands is head of English in a secondary school in Hampshire

This article originally appeared in the 30 April 2021 issue under the headline “How I...‘Front load’ to support learning”