creativity, ideas and innovation

An answer to the question, “How long does it have to be sir?”

I have just finished a round of assessment with my Year 9 SEN group. They are not yet at the stage where we can do extended writing, but given that their last assessment was a verbal presentation, I wanted to get them to write something and think about how words can be used.

I have been a fan of ‘mini-sagas’ in the classroom for a while now. They are a great revision tool and can make students really think about what are the essential elements of a story or topic (see http://is.gd/1j46p). I thought that it might help this group if the assessment was reduced down to 50 words and I made them think about what they had to write rather than how much.

The task was to look at the story of a woman called Kitty Eckersley, whose story appears in the excellent book, ‘Forgotten Voices of the Great War’ by Max Arthur (see bit.ly/90PZwC). I wanted students to explore the relationship between big events in History and the impact on people’s lives. The key skills being tested here were diversity and chronology – for as we call it ‘Patterns in History’. I mini-saga seemed to fit in this appraoch and so I created a seessment sheet ATY9 Kitty’s Storyand we began to draft…

The results were very good, with some students going down a poetic route and others focusing on telling a memorable story. A couple of the mini-sagas can be seen below:

“Kitty worked in a mill. She found love, they got married. He went to war and she didn’t see him for six months. She worked in a leather factory when he came back and bought her a hat. He returned to war, but she got pregnant. Then came THE LETTER.”

“Working hard every day, married a young man who decided to go to war – was terrified. After six months and a lonely Christmas he arrives in January. Pregnant. Seven months later I got a letter saying “I am sorry to tell you of the death of your husband.” Tears fall.”

So, we assessed the impact of the Great War in 30 minutes and in 50 words, which stopped all those annoying questions about how long the assessment has to be. The next step is to work out how we can move students on and allow them to access the higher levels of thinking; getting them to explore the difference between the outbreak of war, which passes Kitty by, and the recruitment drive, which impacts her significantly.

Getting creative with SEN

Today my Year 9 low ability / SEN class made this:

It was the result of a lesson that started by analysing current adverts for their message. We then went on to look at the story of Kitty Eckersley and why her husband joined the Army.

Next, we brainstormed (properly – in fours and in silence, then sharing!) why men might volunteer to fight. With a little help, we came up with four ways that the government might try to persuade people to ‘join up’:

- Patriotism
- Anti-German messages
- Heroism
- Shame

Students then looked at six posters from WWI and identified one of the four elements within them, choosing specific parts and not whole posters.

As an extended plenary, students used the free form capture tool on the whiteboard to cut out the areas for their theme and designed new posters using the bits they had selected. We were able to save it as an image and print it out.

For homework, the students are comparing the posters they created to the Kitty Eckersley story and identirying which of the four methods most influenced her husband.

What was really good to see was students making informed choices and debating whether certain sections could be included under two headings. By allowing the creative task to come to the forefront of the lesson we unlocked a new set of thinking: students were thinking about the interplay of images and text, as well as how to create an overall effect. They got an end product and were willing to invest time in making it look good. Also, they wanted it to work.

Using aMap to create debate

Here is an example of a active aMap (or argument map) currently being used with my Year 13 group. It is excellent for making students think about how to create and back up an argument. The word limits are also useful for concentrating thinking. I have set up groups of students to argue different historical perspectives.

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.

Create meaningful and relevant stories with a difference

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.

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