I recently attended a CPD day on what a successful Classics department looks like, and one particular session has stuck with me: the discussion of departmental resources and their role in teaching and learning. It's prompted me to think more carefully about what we're actually doing when we hand students a worksheet, and whether there's a better way.

It's a topic I've thought about a lot. My MEd research focused specifically on Latin workbooks, and the more I've explored the research literature and reflected on my own practice, the more convinced I've become that coherent, sequenced resources are foundational to good teaching.

The Problem with the Worksheet Pile

Early in my career, I was a worksheet magpie. I'd find something useful on the Classics Library, or in my department's shared Drive, adapt something from a textbook, create something bespoke for a particular lesson. My filing system (generous term) was a chaotic mix of PDFs, Word documents, and photocopies of photocopies.

Students experienced this chaos too. Folders stuffed with loose sheets. "Sir, I've lost the one about the ablative absolute." Lessons that didn't quite connect to what came before. A sense of perpetual improvisation and an immense amount of time spent adapting or creating resources from scratch.

I told myself this was responsive teaching—adapting to the needs of the moment. But I've come to think it was something else: a lack of curricular clarity masquerading as flexibility.

Oates (2014), in his research for Cambridge Assessment, makes a compelling case that high-performing education systems tend to have well-designed, coherent curriculum materials. Bernstein (1990) goes further, arguing that fragmented, invisible curricula can inadvertently disadvantage students who don't arrive with the cultural capital to fill in the gaps themselves. Hendrick (2025) puts this starkly: poorly planned instruction doesn't just make teaching less effective—it makes concept formation impossible for many learners, "systematically abandoning the students who most need our help whilst allowing only the strongest learners to succeed despite flawed instruction."

When resources are incoherent, we're asking students to do significant cognitive work just to understand what they're supposed to be learning—before they even start learning it.

Goals Before Tasks

Why do we have resources at all?

Resources exist to help students achieve learning. Obviously. But the implications of taking that seriously are significant: it means resources should be designed backwards from what we want students to learn, not forwards from what activities we fancy doing.

Wiggins and McTighe (2005) call this "backward design"—starting with the desired results and working backwards to the learning experiences. You begin with the learning intention: what do we actually want students to understand or be able to do by the end of this unit? Then you define success criteria—what would it look like if they'd achieved that? What competencies do they need to demonstrate? Only then do you ask: what resources will help students build those competencies?

Clarke (2014) is helpful here. She distinguishes between learning intentions (the overarching goals) and success criteria (the steps or features that will help students get there). A well-designed resource should embody both: it should make the learning intention visible and provide a clear route towards achieving it. When students engage with learning intentions and success criteria, they can begin to self-assess and direct their own learning. They become, as it were, co-pilots in the process.

Too often, I think, we plan bottom-up. We find a nice worksheet on the Lex Agraria, or a clever activity about noun cases, and we build a lesson around it. The resource drives the learning, rather than the other way round. We end up with a collection of decent individual activities that don't cohere into a meaningful sequence. Sherrington (2014) warns against this—it's tempting to plan lessons as a string of tasks that pupils will do without attending to the role those tasks play in the process of learning. Keeping students "busy" doing something related to the topic feels beneficial, and we assume that at least some learning must result.

Wiliam (2011) makes a similar point: activities that keep students busy can actually obstruct learning if they're not carefully aligned to specific learning goals. What matters isn't what students do, but what they think about—and whether that thinking leads to the learning you intend.

When I plan a unit now, I try to start with the end in mind. For a set text, that might mean asking: what do students need to be able to do with this text in an exam? What literary, linguistic, and contextual competencies does that require? And then: what resources would systematically build those competencies, lesson by lesson, in a logical sequence?

The resource, done well, is the curriculum. It reflects a clear set of decisions about what matters, in what order, and how each piece connects to the whole.

What Coherent Resources Actually Mean

I'm not arguing for a single "correct" format. The CPD training emphasised that the type of resource matters less than its coherence and integration into a clear curricular sequence. A department might use booklets, digital platforms, annotated textbooks, or some combination. What matters is that there's a spine—a sense of where we're going and how each piece connects.

That said, I have a clear preference: workbooks.

This was the focus of my Masters research, and I've become increasingly convinced of their value for language learning in particular.

The Workbook Advantage

1. Students See the Whole Course

I think there's something genuinely useful about a student being able to hold a booklet that represents an entire unit or term. They can flick ahead. They can see where they're going. They understand that today's lesson on purpose clauses connects to next week's work on indirect commands, which builds towards the unseens they'll face in the summer.

Sweller's cognitive load theory (2011) emphasises that novice learners need clear schemas to organise new information. When students can see the structure of what they're learning, they can build mental models more effectively. The workbook is the schema, made physical. Hattie's (2012) work on visible learning points in the same direction—students learn more effectively when they can see where they are in the learning process and where they're headed.

2. Progress Becomes Visible

There's a simple satisfaction in turning pages, in seeing the completed work behind you and the fresh pages ahead. It sounds trivial, but for students who struggle with motivation or who find languages challenging, this tangible sense of progress matters enormously.

I've watched students flip back through their workbooks before an assessment, surprised by how much they've covered. "I didn't realise I knew all this." That metacognitive awareness—that sense of accumulated competence—is harder to achieve when learning is distributed across dozens of loose sheets. Rosenshine (2012) emphasises the importance of building student success and confidence through carefully sequenced instruction; a workbook that visibly tracks that sequence reinforces this.

3. Nothing Gets Lost

This is prosaic but real. Worksheets vanish into the void. They fall out of folders, get left in other classrooms, end up as paper aeroplanes. A workbook stays together. When a student is revising, everything they need is in one place, in sequence, with their own annotations and corrections.

For a subject like Latin, where knowledge is so cumulative—where you genuinely cannot understand the ablative absolute if you haven't secured the ablative itself—this continuity matters. Gaps in notes become gaps in understanding.

4. Teachers Are Freed to Teach

This is Ball and Cohen's (1996) insight. When I'm not scrambling to find or create resources for tomorrow's lesson, I can spend that time thinking about how I'll teach—the explanations, the questioning, the responsive adjustments I'll make in the moment.

The workbook handles the what. My professional expertise handles the how.

What About Enjoyment?

You might think: doesn't all this talk of coherence and sequencing sound a bit... joyless? Surely students enjoy variety, novelty, the unexpected activity that breaks up the routine?

But I think that conflates two different things. There's the enjoyment that comes from novelty and entertainment—the "fun" lesson, the game, the unexpected diversion. But there's also the enjoyment that comes from competence and mastery, from the satisfaction of understanding something that previously seemed opaque. Willingham (2009) argues that the brain is not designed to think—thinking is slow and unreliable—but that we find successful thinking deeply pleasurable. The enjoyment students get from finally grasping the ablative absolute, from translating a sentence independently, from seeing how Tacitus builds his rhetoric, is different in kind from the enjoyment of a word search.

I'm wary of what the research calls "poor proxies"—things like having fun, completing tasks, and being engaged in activities, which we assume signify learning but often don't (Coe, 2013). A classroom can look lively and engaged while very little learning is happening. Conversely, a student working steadily through a well-designed workbook might not look "engaged" in the way we've been trained to expect, but may be thinking hard about exactly the right things.

My old Head of Department had a line in his email signature: Non scholae sed vitae discimus—we learn not for school but for life. The goal of our teaching isn't merely to get students through exams. It's to foster genuine excitement about the classical world—to help them see why this stuff matters, why people have been reading Virgil for two thousand years, why the fall of the Republic still has something to say to us. A well-resourced, carefully planned course, designed specifically for our school context, supports and encourages that. It creates the conditions in which real intellectual engagement can happen, because students aren't fighting against confusion or gaps in their knowledge. They can actually think about the ideas, the language, the history—rather than struggling to work out what they're supposed to be doing.

Students often enjoy coherent courses more than we expect. There's real pleasure in competence, in turning the pages of a workbook and seeing how much ground you've covered. The thirteen-year-old who finally cracks purpose clauses and can translate a sentence that would have baffled them a month ago—that's genuine enjoyment. We don't need gimmicks for that.

Living Documents, Not Tablets of Stone

One concern I hear is that shared resources become fossilised—that once something is "the department workbook," it becomes untouchable even when it's not working.

This is a real risk. But the best departmental resources are living documents, regularly reviewed and refined through collaborative input. Hargreaves and O'Connor (2018) call this "collaborative professionalism"—shared materials become sites for ongoing professional dialogue rather than top-down impositions.

This might look like:

• Built-in review points each year ("What worked? What needs refining?")
• A shared document where colleagues can flag issues or suggest improvements
• Team planning sessions where the workbook is discussed and developed together
• The understanding that version 1.0 is not version final

When resources are genuinely collaborative, they improve over time. They get better because everyone who teaches from them contributes to making them better.

What This Might Look Like for Us

For Latin and Greek, I think workbooks are particularly well-suited to:

Language work: Vocabulary building, grammar exercises, translation practice. The cumulative nature of language learning demands sequence and coherence. Students need to see how the present tense connects to the imperfect, how the nominative relates to the accusative. A workbook can make these connections architectural.

Set text study: A booklet for each prescribed text, with the Latin/Greek on the page, space for vocabulary and annotation, guiding questions, and links to the wider literary context. Students take ownership of their text—literally writing on it, making it theirs.

Classical Civilisation: Sequenced booklets that build understanding systematically. Rather than "here's a worksheet on Tiberius Gracchus," a coherent resource that moves from context → methods → significance → legacy, with explicit connections between sections.

But whatever the format, the point remains: students should experience their learning as a coherent journey, not a series of disconnected stops.

The Takeaway

I think resources get undervalued in teaching—seen as secondary to the "real" work of classroom instruction. But I've come to believe that getting them right is one of the most useful things a department can do. It takes time, and it's not glamorous. But a student with a well-designed workbook in front of them is starting from somewhere different than one with a pile of miscellaneous sheets.