The SOI Model and Primary Lesson Design
A practical framework for helping primary pupils organise knowledge, integrate ideas, and perform with understanding.
📚 Catch Up on the Series
Missed a part? Here’s what we’ve covered so far:
📦 Part 1: Organising Knowledge
Why organising knowledge makes learning stick — and how it helps shape what children remember.
🧱 Part 2: Selecting Task Types
Choosing the right structure to match the thinking: Compare, Sequence, Cause & Effect, Chunk.
Six powerful task examples that group ideas into meaningful mental ‘buckets’.
🏅 Part 4: Ranking and Comparing Knowledge
From Diamond 9s to Target Maps — helping children weigh, prioritise, and reason.
🔁 Part 5: Sequencing Knowledge
From timelines to swim lanes — helping children structure ideas, actions, and events so they flow and make sense
⚙️ Part 6: Cause and Effect Knowledge
From fishbone diagrams to consequence maps — helping children understand why things happen and what they lead to.
🧩 Part 7: The SOI Model and Primary Lesson Design
A mental model for structuring learning: guiding pupils to select, organise, integrate, and perform knowledge with purpose.
💡 The Big Idea
Originally developed by Logan Fiorella and Richard Mayer (2015)1, and adapted by Oliver Caviglioli and David Goodwin2 in Organise Ideas, the SOI Model can be seen as a clear instructional sequence designed to move learning forward:
Select, Organise, Integrate, and finally, Perform.
We’ve already explored task design as a tool for promoting thinking. The SOI Model now gives us a model we can use to structure lessons and units into clear cognitive progressions. By guiding learners through each phase of thinking, we set them up for deeper understanding and a more well-structured schema, leading to stronger performance.
👀 A Closer Look
The SOI model recognises that learning doesn’t happen just because we’ve taught something. Pupils don’t absorb information like sponges, they must select, organise, integrate, and use (perform) knowledge. That’s the heart of this model: helping children organise and process knowledge to make well-structured schemas and mental models.
What I love about the SOI model is its shift in focus. It doesn’t fixate on where knowledge is stored (working memory vs long-term memory), but on how knowledge is actively processed and transferred. It’s about the doing, and that makes it a brilliant fit for lesson planning in primary.
Let’s look at each stage in more detail. You’ll probably find that these don’t feel new, just a really useful way to frame what great primary teachers already do.
🧠 Select
This is where learning begins, by guiding pupils to focus on what matters most.
In primary, this is familiar territory. Teachers model and highlight the key knowledge that matters most. Our multi-novice learners don’t yet know what’s important, just like a lion cub doesn’t yet know what’s dangerous. They need to be shown.
Whether it’s highlighting key vocabulary in a text or extracting the critical steps in a method, selection is about attention: directing focus, reducing noise, and highlighting what is important.
🛠️ Think: modelling, worked examples, teacher narration, and the ‘look here, not there’ moments that sharpen attention.
🗂️ Organise
Once the right knowledge is selected, pupils need to work with it, and this is where task design matters most. Sometimes we skip the organisation of knowledge and head straight to performance, leading to a shallow understanding.
We support children in structuring knowledge through carefully chosen thinking tasks. This might include:
🔹 Chunking – grouping and naming related ideas
🔹 Comparing – ranking or sorting based on specific criteria
🔹 Sequencing – ordering steps, events, or processes
🔹 Cause and Effect – linking actions to consequences
These aren’t just tasks, they’re tools to promote remembering. They allow children to make sense of content, embed it into schema, and build durable understanding.
🔗 Integrate
Here, children begin to use the knowledge they’ve organised. They connect it to what they already know, rehearse it through writing and talk, and refine it through feedback and practice.
Fiorella and Mayer emphasise narration, especially talking and writing, as central to integration. In primary, this might look like:
Guided practice
Whiteboard Work
Oral rehearsal
Drama or freeze frames
Writing with scaffolds
Sentence combining
Retelling or re-mapping ideas
🎭 Perform
This is where pupils use what they’ve learned. It’s the generative learning phase, where they begin to draw on recent and prior knowledge, not just to recall it, but to use it within contexts.
Performance doesn’t mean ‘the big test’. It might look like:
Writing a story
Solving a maths problem
Performing a fair experiment
Justifying and explaining
Reconstructing knowledge organisers
This isn’t just recall or application; it’s the culmination of new and prior knowledge working in unison. This is where rich schemas develop as more neural connections are formed.
✏️ Two Examples of SOI in Action
The SOI model doesn’t prescribe a rigid lesson plan, it gives us a powerful way to think about learning, task sequencing and, therefore, lesson design. Here’s how it might play out in practice:
🧮 Example 1: Maths (SOI as a Single Lesson)
🧠 Select: The teacher models column addition with bridging (e.g. 38 + 47), drawing attention to the carry step, how to record it, and common mistakes. The focus is on process, not just the answer.
🗂️ Organise: Together, the class breaks the method into clear, co-constructed steps:
Line up the digits in columns
Add the ones
Carry if needed
Add the tens, including any carried digit
Record the total
The teacher prompts reflection: “What did we just do there?” and “What needs to happen nest?” These steps are recorded live, on flipchart paper, a visual storyboard, or a whiteboard, and then displayed as a scaffold for students to refer back to.
🔗 Integrate: Pupils practise scaffolded examples, narrating aloud: “8 plus 7 is 15, write 5, carry 1…”. They rehearse in pairs, use visual aids, and analyse common mistakes to deepen understanding.
🎭 Perform: When confident, pupils apply the method to varied problems, including:
Word problems
Two-step problems
Examples with and without bridging
Scaffolds used previously are gradually removed to promote generative learning. This means that they’re no longer just following steps; they’re enacting understanding in real contexts.
IMPORTANT: It is important not to confuse learning processes with pedagogy. For example, modelling should not be isolated to the selection phase. Integration and performance tasks may also need modelling to set expectations and reduce the risk of cognitive overload.
📝 Example 2: English (SOI as a Unit)
🧠 Select: For a unit, pupils explore the structure and features of adventure stories. The teacher helps them extract key text and grammatical features through the analysis of model examples from quality texts.
🗂️ Organise: Children then organise this growing knowledge in different ways:
Boxing up the story structure
Chunking and ranking vocabulary by theme and impact (e.g. fear, excitement)
Comparing effective sentence starters to build tension and portray adventure
Sequencing events in a shared class plan for their story
They’re also building grammatical knowledge: learning new sentence types by chunking their key features and unpicking new writing techniques to add descriptive detail.
🔗 Integrate: Through oral retelling, drama, sentence combining tasks, and short writes, pupils begin to use the components they’ve organised into schematic structures. They draft, get feedback, edit, and redraft. They narrate through talk and writing as they go. Their writing toolkit of organised knowledge is starting to take shape.
🎭 Perform: At the end of the unit or perhaps interleaved throughout the unit, they write their own adventure story opening. They draw on all the organised knowledge from the unit. From sentence structure to sequencing events, they use this knowledge to perform the act of writing their own text.
🔄 A Quick Note on Mini-Cycles
While this example spans a full unit, mini SOI cycles are constantly happening at the lesson level.
In a vocabulary lesson, for example:
Select: New adventurous vocabulary is introduced and discussed
Organise: Words are grouped, ranked, and compared for impact and meaning
Integrate: Pupils use them in oral sentences or short descriptive phrases
Perform: They define the words in their own terms or embed them in a short descriptive paragraph and/or sentences.
These mini-cycles allow learning to build gradually, with each small cycle acting as a stepping stone towards larger, more generative performances toward the end of a writing unit.
🧭 Wrapping It Up
🧠 The SOI Model offers a clear, research-informed structure for designing thinking-focused learning.
🎯 It helps pupils move from guided attention to meaningful, independent performance.
🛠️ Select → Organise → Integrate → Perform is not a script — it’s a flexible model for structuring learning.
🧩 Task design sits at the heart of the model — what we ask children to think about matters most.
🔓 Want more like this?
This post is part of a growing series unpacking what research-informed practice looks like in a real primary classroom.
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In a bit,
Coops 😎
📚 References
Fiorella, L., & Mayer, R. E. (2015). Learning as a Generative Activity: Eight Learning Strategies that Promote Understanding. Cambridge University Press.
Caviglioli, O., & Goodwin, D. (2020). Organise Ideas: Thinking by Hand, Extending the Mind. John Catt Educational.