A Guidebook to Building Permeable Classroom Walls in Secondary Schools

This guidebook has been designed to support teachers, teaching assistants, education practitioners and ambassadors taking part in the Permeable Walls research project or secondary CPD. The research and CPD examines how scholarly thinking, questioning and disciplinary knowledge can support students to understand how different disciplines interact to provide richer answers to questions and better appreciate the nature of science in real world and multidisciplinary contexts.

However, you can still use this guidebook individually or as a team to consider how you can support your students to be more epistemically insightful and understand how their curriculum subjects relate to each other and the “real world”.

This guidebook contains information about the Epistemic Insight Initiative, the learning experiences the can be created through exploration of the curriculum intent, and practical exercises and tools that you can implement in your classroom.

Throughout this guidebook you will find short activities that are designed to deepen your understanding (and sometimes challenge misperceptions). The activities and following reflections are there to support you to develop (or make explicit) an epistemically insightful curriculum for your students.