OK, after a positive start yesterday on my quest to try out 40 different learning objectives before the end of term, I was raring to go today. I only have three lessons on Tuesday and spend a lot of time running around trying sort things out, have meetings and generally try to stay on top of running the faculty.

P1 Year 11 – Order the Learning

The basic premise of this one is to take out the words of the objective and arrange them in order of importance. Today’s was on the ending of Of Mice and Men. I wanted them to consider the techniques Steinbeck uses and to explore their reactions:

Lots of discussion provoked and the hierarchical nature of the task leant itself to the novel as we’ve been doing lots of thinking on power and where the different characters fit into the ranch’s hierarchy. No real agreement was reached about the most important word; some thought Steinbeck as without him there wouldn’t be a book to study; others thought ‘evaluate’ because that’s the skill they need to get an A* and is therefore more important than the text we’re studying; some chose ‘impact’ and ‘readers’ because that was what we were having to think specifically about. As always, the reveal was that there isn’t a right answer. Hurrah! One thing I’ll make clear in the future is not to bother with ‘the’ and ‘of’.

Ease: 9 Impact: 7

P4 Year 10 Film Studies – Einstein

I only see this class once a week as another teacher takes the rest of their lessons. I’ve been having to get my head around stuff like Todorov and am only a couple of steps ahead of them. But what about the objective? Bit gimmicky this one. Basically, it’s just a picture of Eistein writing up your objective. Takes a while to do and no real gain beyond the fact that some of them found it amusing and possibly thought more about the objective due to the novelty value of its presentation. Unsurprisingly, an alarming number of Year 10 do not know who Einstein is.

Ease: 3 Impact: 2

P5 Year 9 – Jigsaw

Year 9 are in the middle of putting together a pitch to launch a new musical artiste and are in the middle of a critical skills challenge. The objective was To be able to see ways of improving my work and other people’s. I have to stand at the top of the stairs in to the English block to welcome in students, so I left instructions on completing the objective jigsaw on the board. They didn’t do it. They way this works is by using your mouse to move jigsaw pieces around to complete the puzzle. Only one student can do it at a time unless you have an interactive whiteboard. It took ages to set it up and made little or no impact on anyone’s learning. Verdict: avoid.

Ease: 1 Impact: 1

I’ll back with more tomorrow.