My aim this week is to get my inbox to nil and so I’m working through the contents slowly but surely – it hasn’t been helped by getting involved in a group fighting against a quarry in my village which for the last 3 weeks has generated about 20-25 emails (Don’t ask!) a DAY!!

Anyway in my quest I came across some great ideas that I’ve been meaning to share:

Trying something new.

Someone emailed me saying that they’d been trying different ways of going through assessments with students after they’d been marked and it got me thinking about how I structure these “going through the test” lessons. It is such an important thing to do in my mind but I’ve always thought that the way I was doing it was too teacher-led and whilst the students were able to identify those “marks they should have got”, which was beneficial, something was missing.

Last week, after the students had colour coded (RAG rated) their test papers and done the “formalities” that follow a test I tried something new with a couple of my groups. I got them working in groups of 3’s or 4’s to compare their answers with others in the group, so that they got the correct METHOD and answer written in their own paper and tallied up these “easily lost marks” (so the outcome was still the same as if I’d been driving the lesson from the front). There were some ground rules:

  • No off task chatting (obviously!)
  • The full method needed to be exchanged and NOT JUST THE FINAL ANSWER.
  • If no-one on their table was able to model a solution ONE person from the table could go and hunt down the correct answer from another group.
  • If they couldn’t find the correct answer from any student in the room only then could they ask me for help – at which point I was able to do some “whole class” work as it was evident that no-one had got a correct answer. Having marked the papers I was aware that there were a couple of questions that I would be doing this with.
  • Students needed to end the lesson with a tally of the marks that they feel they should have gotten correct.

After the lesson I asked the students how they felt about reviewing their tests in this way and it was unanimous that they all enjoyed it but more importantly felt it was beneficial – having looked at their papers there was lots of “remedial” working out shown.  There was one thing that they would change – working in groups that they chose themselves …. ummm … not a chance! It went so well that it’s definitely something I will do with these year groups again, I’m not sure about year 11 as I feel that they need to know that there is something different about they way things are done in their final year and doing it the teacher-led way is something that just feels right for that year group but maybe when my lower year groups have been through this a few more times I’d feel less of a need to be “in control”.

The Final Countdown.

Last year I was sent some revision mats for 3 topics from a guy called Dave Russell (the only thing I’ve done is change them from saying “securing a C” to “The Final Countdown” and added credit to Dave on the bottom) which I used in one of the last lessons before the year 11s final exams. I’d copied onto A3 paper (I find A3 paper adds a novelty factor to any worksheet!) and students worked in pairs to complete all the questions – they worked really well.

The three files are here ->

NEW – 20/2/16

Dave has also sent me his second set of these revision mats … Thanks Dave!

 

Algebra

Shape

Number

Data