Teach, Do, Review

This lesson was inspired by a post I read at http://evteachingandlearning.blogspot.co.uk/?spref=tw. The lesson was a revision lesson for Y10 before their Unit 3 History exam which is heavily skills based. As students came into the room I gave them sheets (differentiated 3 ways) and asked them to jot down everything they could remember about the 6 question types and how to answer them. After taking feedback I asked the students to move to a station Teach do or review. If students moved to the teach table for a particular question they would be taught the basics of how to answer that type of question.

If students moved to the do table, they would be practiscing their learning by looking at an exam question and planning their response using a laminated planning grid. Students would move to the review table if they were confident on the topic and answered a sample exam question. Students had the freedom at any point to move to either table if they got stuck or were ready to move on. Other than the students at the teach table, the rule was 'ask three before me' to encourage collaboration and enable me to target support specifically where I needed it.

Loved teaching this lesson and the feedback from the students was very positive, big smiles all round!

My first attempt at Solo Taxonomy For my first attempt I was not confident about the students ability to be able to categorise causes based on themes. This was where I started. AFter a short discussion about Wars and how they begin, the students came up with accurate definitions of what our four key themes were; economic, social, political and religious. STudents wrote these definitions onto their hexagons and began to tesselate their hexagons based on whether the causes on their cards were economic, social, political or religious. Students were very much engaged in this task ocassionally disagreeing with their group members about where the card/hexagon belonged.

This was the students first attempt. I then asked the students to peer assess each others hexagon creations and talk about any disagreement they had over the causes, again this led to a lengthy discussion. A number of students chose to modify their diagrams as a result of this discussion.

The lesson ended with a plenary asking the studnets to make a judgement about which was the most important cause of the Civil War using Think Pair Share. Studnets will be using this as a basis for their assessment lesson when they will be completing a piece of extended writing about the most important cause of the Civil War.