A Litdrive blog | June 2026

A resource is rarely finished on the day it is made.

Most English teachers know this instinctively. Curating classroom materials: a sequencing task for An Inspector Calls, a set of sentence frames for analytical writing, a knowledge organiser for the Romantics and then you teach it, and it is not quite right. A question lands differently than you expected. Students miss a connection you assumed they would make. A distractor you thought was obviously wrong turns out to be genuinely plausible for a significant proportion of the class. You adjust. You try again. Over time, the resource evolves as precise, responsive to the actual problems of learning English, and in a multi facated way, more useful than it was before.

When many teachers work collectively in this way, subject expertise is built.

What a resource carries

Shulman’s work on pedagogical content knowledge is useful here, because it asks us to think carefully about what a resource actually contains. It is not simply a collection of tasks or content. A well-designed resource encodes decisions: about what knowledge matters most in this unit, about where students are likely to struggle, about how to sequence explanation so that complexity builds rather than overwhelms, about what representations of a concept are most likely to make it comprehensible. Shulman described pedagogical content knowledge as the blending of content and pedagogy into an understanding of how particular topics are organised and adapted for students whose learning may be more vulnerable. And a curriculum resource, at its best, is a material expression of exactly that understanding. It means to make thinking more visible.

This is why sharing a resource is not a trivial act. When an English teacher uploads a scheme of work or a modelled response or a reading guide to Litdrive, they are not just sharing a document. They are sharing a set of disciplinary decisions and those decisions are available to then be interrogated, refined, and built upon by others through their own approach to delivery, in their own classrooms.

Why collaboration matters for how expertise develops

The EEF and Ambition Institute’s joint work on the characteristics of effective professional development (Sims, Fletcher-Wood et al., 2021) is clear that professional learning which leads to changed practice needs to be sustained over time, needs to build on what teachers already know, and needs to provide opportunities for teachers to apply and receive feedback on their developing understanding. Crucially, one of the most consistent findings in the research on teacher professional development is that learning through collaboration- such as structured engagement with colleagues around sharing problems of practice- is significantly more likely to produce lasting changes in knowledge and classroom behaviour than isolated individual learning.

This has specific implications for how we think about resources in English. When a teacher uploads something to a shared platform and another teacher uses it, a conversation becomes possible that would not otherwise exist. When that second teacher adapts the resource and reflects on why, or notes where it did and did not work, the collective knowledge of the community grows in a way that no individual teacher could achieve alone. The EEF’s guidance on professional development identifies collaboration as a key mechanism for behaviour change precisely because it creates the conditions for teachers to examine their own practice against an external point of reference, to surface assumptions they have not yet examined, and to encounter approaches that challenge or extend their current thinking.

For English teaching specifically, this matters in ways that are not always acknowledged. English departments vary significantly in how they sequence knowledge, what texts they teach, how they approach analytical writing, and what they believe constitutes strong reading comprehension. This variation is not simply a problem to be solved — it reflects genuine disciplinary complexity and the professional judgement that good English teaching requires. But it also means that the expertise is often dispersed and invisible. A teacher in a small department in a rural school may have developed a genuinely excellent approach to teaching the history of rhetoric that no one outside their classroom has ever seen. A head of English in an urban MAT may have refined a model of curriculum sequencing across KS3 that other teachers would find directly useful.

The Litdrive resource library exists, in part, to make that dispersed expertise visible.

The narration of the resource

What makes a resource genuinely useful to the professional community is not just whether it can be downloaded and used. It is whether it carries enough of the thinking behind it to be interrogated and adapted thoughtfully. A task without context can be used, but it cannot easily be learned from in the way that serves teachers’ development.

This is where the idea of a resource as a journey becomes significant. A resource that has been taught, reflected on, and revised carries a different kind of knowledge than one that has been designed in the abstract. The revision is the evidence of pedagogical thinking in action. It shows not just what the teacher decided to do, but what they noticed about how students responded, and how that shaped their understanding of what the teaching needed to be.

The NIoT’s work on curriculum-informed professional development and the DfE’s NPQ Leading Teaching framework both point in the same direction here: that teacher expertise is developed most effectively when teachers have structured opportunities to examine curriculum artefacts with the specific goal of understanding the subject knowledge and pedagogical reasoning that underpins them. Resources, in this framing, are not just tools for pupils. They are objects of professional learning for teachers.

What this means for English

English has particular characteristics that make this framing especially pertinent. The subject involves a significant degree of interpretive judgement: text selection, in the framing of analytical questions, in decisions about which aspects of literary and linguistic knowledge to foreground at a given point in the curriculum. There is rarely one correct scheme of work or one right set of modelled responses. There are, however, better and worse-reasoned ones, and the difference between them is usually traceable to the depth and precision of the teacher’s subject knowledge, with the nuanced understanding that a teacher makes the juducious decisions around the resource that most effectively serve their pupils.

This is why exemplification matters. When teachers can see  how a colleague has approached the teaching of a complex text, or how a department has sequenced writing development across three years, it provides a concrete referent for their own thinking. It gives them something to think with, something to interrogate, something to adapt in light of their own context and their own understanding of the subject.

This is how collective subject expertise grows: incrementally, through the accumulation of good decisions made visible and made available to others.

A call to action

Litdrive’s resource library has exceeded over a million downloads. That is a significant body of work, and it reflects the generosity and expertise of the community. But the full value of that resource base depends on teachers not just downloading, but contributing and contributing in a way that makes the thinking behind the resource available, not just the resource itself.

So here is what we are asking.

If you have a resource that you have taught, reflected on, and improved, we would encourage you to share it on Litdrive. And when you do, we would ask you to include a short note that answers three questions: What is this resource trying to do, and why? Where does it sit in a broader sequence? What did you learn from teaching it that changed how you would use or design it next time?

You do not need to have a finished, polished product. The most useful contributions are often the ones that are honest about what worked and what was adjusted, because that is where the professional learning lives.

A a member, you can upload resources directly via your Litdrive account at www.litdrive.org.uk. If you would like to contribute a longer written reflection on a piece of curriculum work via our blog or PD programme, you can find our contributor guidance on the website or get in touch at hello@litdrive.org.uk.

The resource you have taught this year is already better than the one you created at the start of it. That improvement alone is worth sharing for others to learn from.

 

 

Kat Howard is Founding CEO of Litdrive. She is the author of Stop Talking About Wellbeing and co-author of Symbiosis: The Curriculum and the Classroom.

Litdrive is a teacher-led associate subject association and registered charity for English teachers. www.litdrive.org.uk

References

Shulman, L. S. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15(2), 4–14.

Sims, S., Fletcher-Wood, H., O’Mara-Eves, A., Cottingham, S., Stansfield, C., & Van Herwegen, J. (2021). What are the characteristics of effective teacher professional development? A systematic review and meta-analysis. EEF / UCL / Ambition Institute.

Department for Education (2024). National Professional Qualification: Leading Teaching Framework. DfE.