Tips for A level students. Lesson ramblings for teachers (helpful ideas too!)
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This year I launched a Philosophy Ambassadors programme designed for a select group of students who wanted to help on Open Evenings, enhance subject advertisement, provide subject mentoring for other students and extra support through study sessions. One idea discussed was organising and running a charity event. Now this is something that I have never done with my students, mainly because I could never think of a way of raising money that was different from the usual fundraising. But loving a challenge, we ran with the idea of a charity event and brainstormed lots of ideas of how to go about it.
The charity we selected was the Yorkshire Coast Sight Support, who support those with sight loss and visual impairment across Scarborough and the wider area. This local charity has a dedicated team of staff and volunteers who organise social groups and meetings and offer assisted technology and equipment essential for people with sight impairments. We decided that for our event rather than collecting money, we would collect donations (e.g. clothes, dvds, books, toiletries, children’s toys, games) for the Sight Support charity shop. After weeks of preparations including designing posters, contacting local schools and informing parents, we launched the event at the start of January. I am very pleased to say that over a three-week period the students collected over 30 bin liners and 20 boxes full of donations to sell in the shop.
We also put a number of collection pots around college including the staffroom, canteen and library. In total we raised over £200.00 for the Guide Dogs as well. I would like to thank everyone who donated and enabled this event to be such a success. Also a huge well done to the Ambassadors for all their hard work!
Tricky topic – give it a go…
Check out this quiz for Plato:
Can you score 15 out of 15?
Just before Christmas I ran a short CPD session with staff on questioning techniques. Now the difficulty with such an area is that there is no secret ingredient or coverall fail safe approach (like with starters for example, you try an activity and it either works or does not.) However when it comes to questioning, this is not an activity it is a skill, so the first step is recognising what you are currently doing and asking if it is working or not. This is often best supported with an observation, another set of eyes that can listen to the questions asked and the responses given but this is not always the desired approach nor very helpful when running a training session. So instead I turned to my new set of books (and Google of course).
I started the session by asking staff the reasons why we ask questions. Now I know this is not a very creative start however it was necessary to emphasise that we know as teachers why we question (e.g. to interest, engage and challenge students, to check on prior knowledge and understanding, to focus students’ thinking on key concepts and issues etc) but what the research points out is that whilst we know why we question, very few questions are asked that promote reasoning, problem solving and evaluation or to promote students’ thinking about the way they have learned.
This got me thinking back to my PGCE days and Bloom’s Taxonomy. Now I am not a big fan of teaching fads, however Bloom’s to me is different. Back in the 1950’s Dr Benjamin Bloom, educational psychologist and his team, designed a framework that focused upon Knowledge (cognitive), Skills (psychomotor) and Attitudes (affective). This developed into his Taxonomy, a six stage developmental programme of learning. So within my session I give teachers a blank triangle separated into 6 sections and they had to order the subheadings from least to highest order skill:
Continue reading “Ensuring Questioning Impacts Students’ Learning”
For the past year, I have been very interested in the pedagogy surrounding metacognition and how students learn, probably sparked from hearing Bradley Busch at different events (The Science of Learning – What you need to know.) From this, I have been thinking a lot about my students’ essay writing techniques. What I have realised is that I spend a lot of time focusing on essay structure, how to apply critical words, supporting students in articulating a more mature use of language that focuses upon the material covered but are the students really learning how to write an essay? Can a student improve if they are unaware of the writing hoops they are meant to jump through?
As a teacher, and a previous marker for the exam board, I know exactly what an essay should read like. Plus after all the hundreds of essays I have marked, it also feels like the examiner’s mark scheme is etched into my brain. But this is not the case for the students. They know that line of argument is important because I drill it into them. They know they must answer the specific question asked because they highlight their essays after completion. However what I realised is that they probably don’t know WHY I ask them to do this because they don’t see beyond me marking their essays. My students know of the examiner’s mark scheme (it pops up in lessons sporadically) but they have never applied it to their work with any consistency. Not using the examiner’s mark scheme systemically through lessons feels like a key strategy in self-assessment that I have been missing out on.
So, nearing the end of last term I copied and pasted the examiner’s mark scheme 
into a more student friendly table. Front side A01 descriptors, other side A02 descriptors. Each table consisted of 3 columns, first column for the five levels (6 for A2), second column for the descriptions that go with each level and then a final column for the student reflections. Since the end of term often culminates in mock exams and essays, I thought it was the perfect time to pilot the new sheet. So, every student got a mark scheme table sheet and on their unmarked essays (some were second drafts from previous whole class feedback) they highlighted which of the descriptions best suited their work. Afterwards they calculated their mark based on how many points were highlighted within that level.
At first the activity did need quite a bit of explanation, further coaching and repetition but the students soon picked up what was being asked of them. The questions that followed were exactly what I had wanted: “what does breadth or depth mean?”, “how many would a ‘range’ of scholarly views be?” and “I haven’t really used the words in the question throughout, so I haven’t really addressed the question well have I?”. Questions such as these showed me that the students were starting to think like examiners, applying the examiner’s words to their own essay and really reading them from another angle. Once the students had marked their essays and reflected upon what they needed to do to improve, they were given the opportunity to redraft.
Through students identifying areas to develop themselves, using the language of an examiner and then going away to improve their essays without my input, moves essay writing from the usual teacher feedback transaction into high level understanding. My job is to step in when a student says, “I know I need to do… but I don’t know how”. This means that it is the student who is doing the reflection, even if they then struggle with the next step of their essay writing, which is where the teacher then supports the learning process. Whereas the usual transaction is either the teacher pointing out the errors in an essay and then giving the solutions or pointing out the errors and the student not understanding what the errors are.