Cut the fat: streamlining classroom tasks

By Zoe Meza, Head of History

As teachers, efficiency without sacrificing rigour is a perennial goal. In managing my own time, I am always looking for ways to complete tasks meaningfully while making them as efficient and time-saving as possible. In recent years, I have shifted that thinking beyond my personal to-do list and into the classroom.

When I arrived at SMMA, I worked through the centralised resources that had been made, remade and adapted again over time. I found that, from Year 7 to Year 13, there were often tasks that prioritised note-taking and information acquisition above all else. In a subject like History, there is a common assumption that the subject is inherently dense: that using a textbook or information sheet to copy and learn key facts is standard practice, and that rote learning is simply part of the deal.

I began to question this.

At GCSE, pupils certainly need a strong bank of historical knowledge. But knowledge is not valuable simply because it has been memorised. In our GCSE specification, pupils are expected to deploy knowledge: to explain, analyse, evaluate and make judgements about cause and consequence, change and continuity, similarity and difference. I often roll my eyes when friends tell me they would be rubbish at History because they “can’t remember any dates”. Knowing that the Spanish Armada sailed in 1588 is useful. But historical thinking (and being ‘good’ at History) comes when a pupil can use that knowledge to explain why Philip II attempted to invade England at that point, or to analyse why the invasion ultimately failed.

Beyond examinations, I am also a big believer in the importance of application. There is an age-old distinction between intelligence and wisdom: knowing something is not necessarily the same as knowing what to do with it. As I developed in my role as Head of History, a goal began to form. I wanted our pupils not simply to accumulate historical knowledge, but to become increasingly skilled at using it.

The route to deep thinking

Filling tables with information is a common task in History, and it provided a useful starting point for me to experiment with my hypothesis. Instead of giving pupils a textbook and an empty table with broad headings such as “information” and “explain why this matters” (a task that could easily take more than 20 minutes and would be completed with varying degrees of success) I began to interrogate the structure of the task.

If I told pupils to copy information about Nazi propaganda methods, what was I actually asking their brains to do? Was the task requiring deep historical thinking, or was it creating unnecessary work before the thinking could begin? Could every pupil independently navigate a dense textbook, identify the relevant information, decide what mattered and then record it accurately? And, most importantly, what was the purpose of the activity?

I began to call this “cutting the fat” colloquially with my colleagues.

By “fat”, I didn't mean knowledge. Knowledge remains essential. I wanted to cut out the unnecessary processing that sits between pupils and the thinking I actually want them to do. So I began to pre-populate the factual information in our tables before printing the worksheet.

Returning to Nazi propaganda, I began to provide pupils with the different forms of propaganda used during the 1930s alongside detailed, carefully selected facts: the frequency of radio broadcasts, the purpose of particular propaganda methods, the names of key rallies and their attendance figures. After all, I am the subject expert in the room. I know which information matters for the exam specification and what I want pupils to remember.

This had an immediate advantage. Every pupil started with the same precise and relevant knowledge. Pupils who found the subject more challenging because of literacy or confidence were not first required to overcome the additional hurdle of finding and extracting information from a dense text. They had the tools they needed to take the next step. There was also something deceptively simple about the visual presentation. Half of the sheet was already complete. Finishing the task felt achievable. However, most importantly I want to note that the task itself had not become less rigorous. I had made the route easier; which encouraged deeper and harder thinking. Every pupil in the room had the key information in front of them. Their challenge was to do something with it:

• If pupils knew that the Nazi Party was broadcasting propaganda on the radio and that radios were deliberately made available in public spaces such as cafés, what could they infer about the potential reach and impact of Nazi propaganda on ordinary Germans in the 1930s?
• If pupils knew that some Nazi rallies attracted hundreds of thousands of people, what could they suggest about the visual presentation of Nazism and the impression of mass support?

The factual knowledge was the hook on which pupils could hang their explanations.

This distinction has become increasingly important to me. I do not want to make tasks easier by removing the difficult thinking. I want to make the route to ‘difficult’, deeper thinking more efficient. If the purpose of the task is for a pupil to analyse the significance of a historical development, why should their ability to locate the relevant sentence in a textbook be an unnecessary barrier to getting there? It is worth saying that there are, of course, times when locating, selecting and recording information are themselves the skills we want pupils to practise. But they should be deliberate choices rather than accidental features of a task.

Cutting the fat across the department

The principle has since gone beyond how we ask pupils to fill in a table.

As a team, we began to look critically at our slide presentations, many of which were full to the brim with information and streamlined them. We structured lessons around similar or identical patterns that were both predictable and accessible. We made it commonplace to tell pupils at the beginning of a lesson where we would get to by the end. We removed guesswork. Our lessons became snappier, clearer and more focused, partly because our planning had become more efficient and that efficiency translated into delivery. I still believe that the lessons are interesting and engaging, despite being efficient and rigorous: in fact, they are interesting and engaging precisely because they are efficient and rigorous. 

In practice, we kept asking ourselves the same questions:

• Why have we put this task here?
• Is this “busy work”?
• Am I actually encouraging pupils to think?
• Can I “cut the fat”?

These questions helped us become more deliberate about where we placed the cognitive demand in a lesson. Rather than filling lesson time with activities that looked productive, we wanted pupils to spend that time doing something intellectually worthwhile. The aim was never to reduce rigour but rather to concentrate it.

Over time, our pupils have become accustomed to a rigorous History classroom. They know that having the knowledge is only the beginning. They are increasingly expected to use it: to make connections, explain significance, analyse evidence and construct judgements. The change to our day to day practice has not been particularly arduous, but the payoff has been significant.

Has it made a difference?

The approach has sat alongside some strong outcomes. In both our 2025 and 2026 GCSE results, over 45% of our pupils achieved a Grade 7+, while over 70% achieved a Grade 5+. In 2025, the subject also achieved a Progress 8 score of +1.1. 

These results give us confidence that making our classrooms more efficient has not meant making them less rigorous. Our most-able pupils have been able to move beyond simply demonstrating what they know and delve further into the complexities of History. At the same time, pupils with lower prior attainment have been able to start tasks with the same essential knowledge as their peers, rather than first having to overcome unnecessary barriers to accessing it.

For me, that is what “cutting the fat” is really about: making sure that the things we ask pupils to do are worth doing. If we can remove the unnecessary work, we can give pupils more time, attention and cognitive space for the work that matters: thinking historically.