|
||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||
|
| About the GTC | |
| Registration | |
| Standards and regulation | |
 |
GTC Networks |
 |
Achieve |
|
Connect |
|
Engage |
|
Learn from each other |
|
Access resources |
|
Find out what's happening nationally |
| Teacher Learning Academy | |
| Continuing professional development | |
| Policy | |
| Research | |
| Parents | |
| Events | |
| News and features | |
| GTC Publications | |
| Teaching: the GTC magazine | |
| Video section | |
| Useful websites | |
Louisa Nichols is the head of psychology and teacher of history at Raine’s Foundation School.
Raine’s Foundation School is an inner city, voluntary aided, Church of England, 11-19 secondary school in London. Louisa wanted to help her students develop positive attitudes towards learning through a more interactive approach. She wanted to see how far thinking skills activities might be an effective strategy for doing this.
Louisa wanted to learn about:
Louisa designed a ‘collective memory’ activity based on thinking skills principles that she had been introduced to as part of her in service training. The task involved showing students a poster about their current history topic and asking them to work together, in mixed ability groups, to reconstruct it. Louisa researched possible posters for this task and identified two that contained lots of information and diagrams to support the scheme of work.
Louisa asked the head of history to observe one of her lessons in which she used this activity at the start of the project, and one at the end of the project. She asked him to assess her teaching, her students’ group work, their learning and their engagement.
After the first observation, he worked with Louisa to develop her understanding and skills for setting up tasks. After the second observation he reported that Louisa’s instructions were extremely clear and that all of her students understood what was expected of them.
When Louisa first introduced this task she found managing the behaviour of her students quite difficult but by the end of the project she had developed her self confidence and saw an improvement in their behaviour.
After using the ‘collective memory’ activity with a group of year 9 students she asked them to complete a feedback form which asked:
Louisa found that at the end of the six months her students:
They commented:
‘It was such fun, I even think I’ll remember some of the stuff on that poster’
‘We worked really well as a group and we all helped each other remember things’
Louisa intends to implement this activity across the key stage 5 subjects she teaches. She wants to share her findings with the rest of her colleagues so they can work together to consider how they might make use of this activity, and other similar activities in their lessons.
How might you make use of Louisa’s questions to find out what your students think of different activities in your lessons? Could you make use of Louisa’s ‘collective memory’ activity to explore the effect it has on the amount of information your students recall? How might you adapt this activity to make use of it in other subjects?
You can find out more by reading the following RoM tasters:
in the Thinking skills taster pack (PDF, 83kb).
