There’s many jobs to complete around Discipline of English, and I’ve rather given myself too many threads to tie off! But one I want to get done asap is to turn the Literature lessons into a student workbook.
This is inspired by a school I visited once upon a time that printed their own workbooks for English. These were not the blank A4 Espo order. These were branded on the front cover, and the inside covers contained the glossaries and learning journeys for the year groups. Coming from a school that spend the first day of term sticking sheets into books (with varying degrees of success), this seemed like a great idea.
If a department has a rigid scheme of work to follow, why not take it a step further, and pre-populate each page with the title, learning objectives and key knowledge? On the one hand, this would seem highly prescriptive – defining every lesson in sequence for the teacher and student. But where these lessons are fully available online, it facilitates the learning of the student by allowing them the continuity that is often missing from curriculum. When the workbooks are completed and reflect all of the potential learning, tuition can allow the student to proceed at their own pace; getting ahead in advance of a lesson, or catching up on things missed.
Each page of the work book should contain; title, LO, key vocabulary, sentence stems, core knowledge, a space for the student response and a QR code to the lesson. This is all mandatory for the learner and yet teachers will often ask that students copy down the material from the board, wasting learning time, human engagement opportunity and creates the problem of divergence in knowledge, not standardisation. Students will copy with mistakes, students will fall behind and fail to copy everything, students will be absent, or books will get lost. Copying from the board does not ensure parity of knowledge across a class. Some teachers will have students stick this into their books, and this I believe is the way forward. If it is important enough to copy, it is important enough to be done accurately, and the accuracy is upheld when it is administrated.
This creates a problem for the curriculum writer. Now, there are three documents creating redundancy; the curriculum document, the online lesson and the student workbook. A change to one must reflect all three. Had I better coding skills, each document would be dynamic and changes to one would automatically change the other two. Actually, the curriculum document must be the master, and the remaining slave documents driven by the master doc. It’s something I can do within a Microsoft work environment, and a skill to learn in this online space.
For time time being, I’ll be manually building a workbook for students to use alongside their English tuition.
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