There’s a suddenness to the arrival of review week on the PS10: one minute you’re shifting uncomfortably in your seat during induction week and the next you’re puzzling over the blank space where a scheme of work would normally be. There is of course a Week 5 folder on the W Drive full of shared materials, which teachers are free to add to and draw from as they please. While this bank varies in appropriacy (e.g. in terms of student level), it certainly has something to offer anyone with a lesson or two to fill, though not the full week.
For many teachers, the week 5 void is a window of opportunity; a brief release from the strait jacket of a rigorous curriculum. The chance to cut loose a little. For others, it’s an uncomfortable silence in need of filling. Falling somewhere between these generalised extremes, I prepared classes – quite extensively by my own standards – designed to mine more deeply the materials I’d given a (reasonable) once-over; to stimulate a renewed interest in familiar input, and, in the process, put to rest some lingering classroom issues.
The campaign was assured of some success, having been developed and road-tested earlier in the year through a process of Action Research – a collaboration initiated and guided by Julia Gardos on the erstwhile-known Exploring British and Academic Culture (EBAC) course during in-sessionals. Armed with a refined version of our output from that research, I prepared for the week in question by leading a one-hour CPD session that explored the following activities, yielding much valuable teacher feedback in the process.
Theory Induction: Walking the Dogme
My primary concern was in reviewing and consolidating the first four weeks’ work as thoroughly as possible, which meant reviewing and consolidating students’ work on/with Browne and the application of theories Consensus and Conflict – all notable for their uncontested popularity among pre-sessional teachers. It also meant approaching this familiar content with a view to promoting student autonomy, giving rise to my second consideration: keeping materials to a minimum. Thus, we managed with little more than a flipchart, scrap paper and a few Padlets.
Figure 1: Conflict or Consensus? (Image Interpretation)
Monday was devoted to group work: students first filling a Padlet (figure 1) with interpretations of facts and images relating to Browne’s themes and theories, later filling a table full of information drawn from the text itself. The former was intended as a Classroom Assessment Technique (CAT) to determine the extent to which students were already conversant in the theories encountered; the latter to add detail to the kind of generalised understanding that – not unreasonably perhaps – produces innumerable, unsubstantiated references to ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ people as the respective malefactors and maleficiaries of society. Among the details sought by the table were specific, named examples of these over-generalised entities e.g. ‘the wealthiest 5%’. Ideally, students would go on to explicitly reference said parties in SAQs and seminars. Ideally.
Informed Debate
By way of substitution for the now-familiar seminar format, students took part in debate on the Tuesday, taking home on Monday a list of facts and statistics drawn from or influenced by Browne to prepare their arguments. While the debate centred, predictably enough, on conflict vs. consensus perspectives of Browne-covered topics, the aim was to prompt more spontaneous and focused responses from students than often occur during seminars. There was also a catch: students would not learn till just before the debate which side they would be arguing, and thus had to prepare arguments for both Conflict and Consensus views. This particular detail had been favourably received by students on the EBAC course, albeit with some scaffolding.
Each debate consisted of two rounds, each subject to an evaluative vote by a panel of peer reviewers. Alas, not one of the four Consensus teams managed to secure the winning vote, but every student received an extensive speaking turn, and, notionally at least, everyone would have practised arming themselves with the kind of balanced view needed to undertake an SAQ.
Developing Perspective
While evidence of technical development was but intermittent in subsequent seminars – student utterances remaining mechanical for some time – activities such as the above were more clearly manifested in SAQ writing, with timed argument preparation activities preceding the planning process on several occasions and SAQs themselves showing increasingly balanced argumentation as students drew upon such resources with apparently growing confidence.
Figure 2: The Discussion Clock
I supplemented this approach on the Wednesday with a device commonly used in exam preparation classes: the Discussion Clock (figure 2), as well as some relevant functional language. Though potentially quite generic, this device fills the void of inspiration with a range of possible perspectives to apply to any given discussion topic e.g. ‘from a sociological perspective/point of view/standpoint, gender equality laws in the workplace represent…’. While my suspicion that little use would be made of it in the longer-term proved to be grounded, its purpose – to promote the application of multiple theories and perspectives to a given issue – was recognisably fulfilled in the short-term at least. In fact, much of one class was taken up with an activity in which students raced one another to produce topical interpretations from a randomly selected perspective. Ensuring that students continue to make use of such a resource is, however, an important future consideration.
Visualisation as a Classroom Assessment Technique
Possibly the most well-received consolidation activity was Rich Picture illustration, which essentially consists of small groups formulating a visual response to or summary of an issue or topic, without interference/influence from supervisors/ teachers. Apparently as valued in corporate environments as those educational (Bell & Morse, 2013), it also earned its CAT stripes throughout review week, with groups engaging in detailed discussion (not always in English, alas) and then delivering mini presentations on their decision-making, providing clear indication of their understanding of the subject matter throughout, not to mention an exemplary facility for graphics. Of particular note was the students production of infographic-style visualisations (figure 3) of selected statistics from the pre-debate materials e.g. ‘more than 80% of people in prisons come from the manual labour classes’ (though this appeared in a later topic, of course). Obviously, I was conscious of the process’ value as scaffolding for the visualisation stage of the MRR project, as well.
Figure 3: Rich Picture of Discipline-Specific Lecture Content
Reflection
Responses from CPD session attendees towards the end of the pre-sessional indicated that these ideas were of some practical value both during and beyond Review Week, both for practical and affective reasons. Granted, my evidence is more anecdotal than empirical, but from the perspective of my own teaching experience the activities can help give shape to the information blur of the first four weeks and – more importantly – help students to shape their own learning experiences.
References
Bell, S. and Morse, S., 2013. How people use rich pictures to help them think and act. Systemic Practice and Action Research, 26(4), pp.331-348.
Evans, V., 1998. Successful Writing Proficiency, p.59