Materials for engagement

I've set up another site full of materials to help teachers, departments and schools engage with CfE and the new outcomes. Just click on the English and Literacy section. I'll be adding more over the next couple of weeks.

Among other things, there are diagrams explaining the layout of the outcomes, and a couple of pages which explain the differences between the new outcomes and 5-14/ Standard Grade.

Have a look here.

Draft English & Literacy Outcomes Published

Yes, they're finally out! Download them here.

More information and materials will follow.

Critical Essay Findings

The Aberdeenshire AifL project which has been looking at the teaching of critical essay writing has made great use of a pupil questionnaire devised by Linda Donnelly and Kathryn Russell of Meldrum Academy.

The questionnaire is designed to find out how well pupils feel they coped with different elements of essay writing and which teaching strategies they value. It consists of multiple choice questions and asks pupils their opinions on their knowledge of texts, their understanding of the task, structure, using quotations, timing and assessment.

Having now analysed the results, the group are going to focus on teaching strategies which:

• give pupils more choice when it comes to text and task
• involve more collaborative working
• focus on handling quotations
• raise pupil's awareness of the benefits of peer assessment

as these are the issues the questionnaires flagged up.

Linda and Kathyrn are happy to share the questionnaire. If you would like a copy to use with your pupils, please leave a comment with an email address and I will send it out to you.

More info on the progress of the project will follow in the coming months...

Books for Reluctant Readers

Publisher Barrington Stoke's books aimed at reluctant readers have been going down extremely well with pupils in Aberdeen City. Several departments have been using these titles which deal with themes affecting today's youngsters. Pupils, especially those unmotivated third year boys, seem to love them . Photocopyable teacher packs are available which are full of close reading questions and activities to generate writing and discussion.

Two particularly popular titles are TWOCKING by Eric Brown, and Burnout by Robert Swindells. TWOCKING deals with a group of friends who become involved in joyriding and have to deal with peer presure and ultimately bereavement and guilt. (The title refers to the Police term 'Taking Without Consent'). Burnout looks at firestarting and most English teachers will already be aware of the quality of Robert Swindells other novels.

To have a look at the full range of texts on offer, visit their website here.

CfE Twilight Seminar 11th Feb

I'm delivering a twilight seminar for Aberdeen City English and Primary teachers on Curriculum for Excellence. This will take place in Summerhill on Monday 11th February at 4.15pm. Teachers from Aberdeenshire and Moray would be welcome to come along too.

I'll look at the background and rationale of CfE, as well as discussing possible implications for English teaching. Language and Literacy outcomes will hopefully be released next month and this session will provide a context in which they can be considered. It will be best suited to those who have not had an opportunity to engage with CfE in schools.

Information should be out this week, but you can always email me at gomckenzie@aberdeencity.gov.uk if you can't find it or would like further details.

Burns Night Resources

It's Burns night on the 25th of January - if you're thinking of marking the occasion in your classroom or department, LTS have a few pages crammed with links and resources which will help. They look at Burns, Scotttish culture and also poetry in general.





You'll find Early Years resources here,

Primary Resources here

and Secondary resources are here.


In addition to this, the Robert Burns World Federation has organised a range of national and school-based competitions suitable for pupils in primary, secondary and special schools. The closing date for these is not till March 22nd. Full details here.

There are also school-based competions which you can run in areas such as verse-speaking and writing in Scots language. Work can be sent away and rewarded with official certificates from the federation. It may well be that work already completed can be recognised in this way.

I'd love to hear about any Burns-related work going on in schools over the next week or two!

Wordcount Website

Just for fun!

WordCount™ is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonness. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is. Type in a word and discover how commonly we use it.

Don't use "Query Count" with pupils...

Listening at 5-14

Listening resources tend to be pretty thin on the ground. The LTS 5-14 English Language resource page has a few simple sheets which could be useful.

• You can find a reading/listening unit based on a short extract from Roald dahl's 'Boy' here.

• There is a listening exercise relating to genre identification here.

• The resources page also features sheets which pupils can complete after group discussion and class debate as evidence of listening.

If you want to view the whole page, you'll find it here.

Talking and Listening will be grouped together in the new outcomes, which will be published in the new year.

Writing using Mobile Phones in Class

John Gerard at Meldrum Academy has been making great use of the cameras on his pupils' mobiles to improve their writing. It's a really easy process (honest) which is fully explained below.

Working through a piece of writing in stages he follows modelling of, for example, an introduction, by asking his pupils to photograph their progress on their phones and send it to his computer via bluetooth. He then opens these files so that they display onto the whiteboard for class discussion before they move onto a new section. Here's one pupil's offering to let you see how it looks:

He adds comments from their discussion onto the screen and when the process is complete, pupils get a printout of a set of notes entirely produced by the class. This seems to me a superb way of involving pupils more in their learning, giving immediate feedback, encouraging peer-assessment and using technology relevant to pupils' lives. And let's not forget that they must love working this way!

You don't even need an interactive board for this, just a projector connected to a PC. One thing you will need though is a blutooth dongle like this one:

They cost around £5 and plug in to your PC just like a pen drive, allowing your PC to receive bluetooth messages. (they're a great thing to have to get your own mobile phone pictures onto your PC at home!)

to receive a file from a pupil, plug in the dongle and right click on the bluetooth icon on your desktop:

then ask the pupil to send the file to your PC using bluetooth. The PC will appear in their phone with it's network name, shown here in red.

You then select "receive a file" from the menu on your PC and follow the prompts to save the file to your computer. It would be a good idea to create a folder specifically for these images.

And that's it! Remember that the pupils will know how to do this much better than you already, so if you're not one of those control-freak teachers, let them help you and writing could become more fun and productive for everyone! Thanks to John for the instructions!

If you're doing something similar, leave a comment and let us know. If you give this a try, I'd love to hear about your progress.

English Inside the Black Box

You may well have read or heard of Black and Wiliam's "Inside the Black Box" which gathers together their findings on best practice in formative assessment, but have you seen this little gem? It's only twenty pages long, but I recently heard one PT describe it as "twenty pages of gold".

What I like about it most is that they begin by looking at the nature and aims of English teaching, and discuss the difficulties of assessing a subject which has two very different faces: the technical and the imaginative. The answer to this, Black and Wiliam decide, lies in the development of English teacher's judgements. This highlights the importance of frequent moderation and discussion.

They go on to look at the four main aspects of formative assessment which have been proved to raise pupil achievement and develop lifelong learners:

• Classroom talk (including questioning)
• Feedback
• Sharing learning intentions/ success criteria with the learner
• Peer and self-assessment

but before you sigh in memory of some whole-school AifL inset, they discuss these with relevant examples from the English classroom, and suggest many little things you might try to involve pupils more in their own learning.

Who currently does the most work in your lessons: you or the pupils? If the balance is all wrong, give one or two of the ideas in this little book a try.

There should be a copy in school, but if not you can obtain them at £5.00 each by emailing the publisher at:

information@nfer-nelson.co.uk

Leave a comment if you have any thoughts on this publication or can recommend any others...