learning | Eat.Sleep.Teach.

Planning GCSE with a smile

GCSE is a bit like going to the dentist for a check-up: you know that it is good for you in the long-run, but it leaves such a horrible taste in your mouth. Every so often it is worth going back to basics and designing a course from scratch. In this way you can ensure that it is enjoyable and contains learning that has real worth. The TEEP cycle can offer assistance when trying to achieve this not just for lessons, but in planning a whole scheme. Outlined below are six easy steps for creating a scheme of work that challenges students and makes GCSE much more rigorous:

1. Prepare for Learning

The Big Picture is essential – both for teachers and students. Without it, the learning becomes a series of virtually independent chunks that bare no relation to each other. Planning without the big picture tends to produce a scheme that is heavy on content and light on memorable learning. From the perspective of the students, there is little to hang on to.

Firstly, a big idea or question is needed that will guide students through the work and offer them a line to pin their new learning on. Questions work well, because they encourage an answer and this in turn leads to better engagement. A unit on Crime might be approached with the following question:

Is Britain more violent and crime ridden than it has ever been?

The first lessons in the scheme – your way of grabbing them and getting them to think as soon as they came through the door – might focus on creating a debate or dilemma. For example, cutting out reports from newspapers about crime and creating a class montage helps to establish how the topic is viewed by the Media. This can then be analysed for dominate themes, e.g. crime is violent, on the increase, involving more children, more sexual in nature, etc. Offering an alternative viewpoint to this forces students to think about the following content and filter it through the debate. They will need to ask questions of and engage with the materials you provide.

When students see Steven Pinker providing an argument that the world is less violent than it has ever been and saying he can prove it, the reaction is always one of shock (see the film at http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html). This approach establishes a real problem that students will want to spend the unit investigating.

The students will now be thinking about the topic and actually caring about its contents – for a moment they might actually forget it is a GCSE exam unit.

2. Agree Learning Outcomes

The next step should be to establish how the question is going to be tackled. In lessons teachers discuss the content, process and benefits, and extending this to a whole scheme helps to increase understanding. The content is easy, you have a Big Question and the specifications state the boundaries. The process might take a little longer, but agreeing on a logical framework in order to answer the question is needed to assist understanding. Equally vital is identifying the skills needed and tools at hand. Now for the benefits. Exam preparation is a clear one, but then unpicking other benefits can lead to greater motivation among students. This is substantially easier if the big question is rooted in a real and genuine problem.

3. Present New Information

Before launching into the content proper, overview activities encourage students to make links and tease out the key words and ideas in the topic. This process allows students time to familiarise themselves with the topic before they begin. It is a chance to embed the main ideas of the unit. It could essentially be seen as an early revision opportunity.

‘Chunked up’ learning and creating mini-enquiries, each with a question and a relevance to the main enquiry will also help to aid understanding and maintain interest. Tackling the smaller parts makes it more manageable for students and allows for regular review of the Big Question. These reviews can be linked to exam question practice that will allow staff the track and monitor performance.

4. Construct Understanding

Content should be delivered through a range of activities that engage students with problems to solve and hypotheses to test.

For example, mystery activities can not only deliver new information, but provide dilemmas that engage students in the process of analysis. This Billy the Kid Pardon Activity gets students working on a real life dilemma from 2007.

5. Apply to Demonstrate

Each section of the course can be concluded with activities to extend thinking and help students piece together information to answer the Big Question. One strategy for this is model making. The models can physically represent the information in a way that was easy to remember. It could be as simple as making a hat for each part of the course, where the inside, outside and brim all represent something different. Another strategy is to use concept maps and get students to make links between the key facts within the section. Links help with memory and develop understanding.

6. Review

Starting the year with a blank display board and gradually added work, evidence and models under the Big Question is a great way to keep track of learning and develop a clear approach. Reviews in each lesson should be easy to plan as teachers can refer back to the Big Question and discuss whether an answer is anywhere near being established. Answers can be unpicked to see how students have come to their conclusions. The strategies they used can be recorded for future use, creating a kind of GCSE toolkit for them to refer to and use.

A unit can seem like a long time, but sandwiched together it is only about twenty four hours (of teaching). However, leaving students with an activity that is creative and exciting will help with positive feelins aout the work. The tendency can be to assess at the end of the unit, but this does not always provide students with an opportunity to look at a unit in its entirety and make sense of it. Neither does it provide a natural high with which you would want them have. No actor would want to go through weeks of rehearsals only to find they were writing the programme notes. It doesn’t have to be grand, just fun and cover the whole unit. Making a song about the topic set to an appropriate tune would be simple and not very time consuming, but it would also be memorable.

The process of learning at GCSE should engage students and focus them in a way we expect from Key Stage 3. They must feel part of the learning and care about the final outcome.

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Create meaningful and relevant stories with a difference

Add stories, photos and sounds to map — Create living maps with sound, stories and images

One way of creating meaning and relevance behind stories is to use illustrations and photos of various kinds. An even more powerful way is to add sound to a story to really capture a particular moment or event. Imagine including all of these features and add them to the exact location on a map. This is what MapSkip offers its users: create stories around a particular place.

After registering with the website find a location you wish to write about, for example the Normany landings in 1944 or example of coastal erosion on the North Norfolk coast, add a ‘marker’ in the shape of a hand and a small box with a form will appear and you can give the place a name. Now you can also upload a photo or drawing, and why not include an MP3 file which captures the fierce fighting during D-Day landings? Another good idea could be to create longer investigations with a class and keep adding to the map as you work through a unit, for example as they discover more about an individual’s journey, they can create a very detailed, meaningful and relevant story about this person.What about producing sound-trails or interviews from your locality and add them to your map like a local study?

Imagination is everything with this tool and students tend to think of 100s of ideas about how they can demonstrate their understanding of a topic or unit. This is a superb educational tool and one worth exploring further.

Using 'The Ten Faces of Innovation ' in the classroom

I am currently running a summer school for 35 Gifted and Talented students – it has been a great experience based around a murder mystery set in a temporary WWII hospital. At the beginning of the process I wanted to have an original way to group students and get them thinking about the who they should work with and why.

After discussing the advantages and disadvantages of friendship groups with them, we looked at a set of cards (click here to download the Ten Faces Card Sort) based on the fantastic research and writing of Tom Kelley. He has written a book called ‘The Ten Faces of Innovation’ and it outlines the 10 personas that he believes make for creative projects and solutions. I made a card in pupil speak for each of the personas and gave it to individual students on cards. They then had to create a diamond 9 diagram and discarded one card at seemed irrelevant to them. The diagrams they created then formed the basis of their negotiations for creating groups. Each team had to have five members and each having a strength in a different area.

The process worked really well and ensured that each group had, on paper, the abilities needed to be creative. There were a lot of students whose social and inter-personal skills were high, and just a few with ability to create exciting designs and experiences. This made them go for a premium and wanted by all groups. Eventually, students were questioning each other about who had design skills on the third level of their diagrams, and were asking if they recruited two people in this area whether that would be enough.

The real point, i think, of activities like this is to challenge students to work with different people and in a variety of ways. There is a great deal of academic evidence to suggest that ability to adapt to surroundings and circumstances is linked to happiness, acceptance and emotional progress in students. This activity begins to instil that approach with the students. I have always found that being open and allowing students opportunities to work both with friends and then others creates a good classroom ethos. With some classes I use a laminated football pitch poster and we tally the times that we work with friends and without and try to keep it even.

The crucial part of all this work is in the debrief or plenary to the activity. Here, the learning needs to be unpacked, but this must include questions on how effectively the group worked and how they went about tackling the problem or issue. In this way the messages about group work are reinforced by the experience and the reflection.

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Learn 2.0

Clay Shirky raises some interesting issues in his TED talk (http://tinyurl.com/lphud3) about how groups work. The issue for educators has to be how do we transform the learning experience to match the processes of those who regularly contribute to online activities. Sharing is part of the online culture and many young people are able to share videos and files without a second thought. How would Facebook or World of Warcraft look if it were a classroom activity. Our initial thoughts are that activities be open ended and should offer students a choice over expression and output. More ideas to follow…

Learning collisions

Can you remember an event when you learned something unexpectedly? A ‘learning collision’. Let me explain.

I had been at a conference in London and was traveling back to Norfolk by train. When the train approached Cambridge we were informed that passengers had to go by coach to Ely and than onwards to Norfolk by train. This came as no surprise to travellers that day and we all shuffled through the train station towards the front of the building where the coach was expecting us. Unfortunately, there were more than just a few people waiting for the coach, in fact, hundreds of passengers were waiting patiently to be taken to Ely to catch the next link on their journeys. Eventually, a bunch of us got together to share a taxi: a lady from Northern Ireland, a pensioner from South Creak, a bishop and a Swede (this could have turned into a rather good joke I think!) and eventually managed to catch the next available train without being delayed for too long. A seemingly dull and potentially cumbersome trip turned into a very interesting and rewarding experience because of this slight miss-hap.

I had the pleasure of sharing the last leg of my trip with the bishop. He told me that education was very close to his heart as well and that his current role involved working with a lot with young adults. ‘Learning, I mean real learning’ he said, ‘takes place when you least expect it’. He went on to explain that the biggest impact his teachings ever have on his students is when they go on pilgrimages because each student experience something different to the other ones. The impact of their learning journeys continue after the pilgrimage, in later lessons and beyond. Talking to this friendly man got me thinking about how our students learn, why they learn and when they learn best. Isn’t it true that learning stays with you longer when you experience it and when you take an active part in it?

My wife and I spent a week in Dorset a couple of years ago and we also spent a few hours in Tolpuddle. As a History teacher this area is particularly interesting. Tolpuddle in the 1830s was a quaint little village where a small group of farm labourers joined together to protect their wages which were decreasing in this part of the country . The government, worried about workers rebellion, and worse case scenario revolution, encouraged local landlords and employers to come down hard on this small group of men. Eventually the six men were transported to Australia. They became known as the Martyrs of Tolpuddle – or The Tolpuddle Martyrs.

I always found this story especially interesting as the six men were treated so harshly for something rather peaceful, namely discussing what they could do to ensure they could feed their families at the end of the week. According to historical documents the ‘Topuddle Six’ gathered by a large oak tree to talk. When we arrived at the village my wife took a series of photos of me posing in front of ‘the tree’ which I could use to show my students. Suddenly an older gentleman stopped his car and asked why we were taking snaps of the tree. I explained the reasons for our peculiar behaviour but he interrupted me and asked if I really believed that the Martyrs would have sat by that particular tree. He then went on to explain that his great grandfather, his own father and himself were all brought up in Tolpuddle and he had been told that the six men never, and he repeated ‘never’, sat by that tree. ‘Guess why they didn’t?’. I was unsure so he said: ‘If that’s the Manor Farm and they sat there (pointing towards both locations), do you really think they were that stupid to sit 20 yards away from the boss?’. I had never questioned the legends or even local documents. Examine the photograph, find the tree, the manor farm and then think about it, would they really have sat there? Of course not. i just had a ‘learning collision’ which I will not forget.

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