Mastering skills and knowledge

by Jane Wade,
Teacher of Religious Education

In RE, we have just an hour a week to cover the GCSE syllabus and I often find it hard to teach the knowledge as well as helping students master the skills they need.   In order to help with this, I now provide students with access to the knowledge and they develop their understanding of this at the same time as mastering a key exam skill. 

 

I take a typical question and provide each student with a knowledge organiser/summary sheet.  Around the room (and given to some students) are snippets of information that a student needs to know to answer the question.  The students move around the room, finding all the information, reading it, then deciding where it belongs on their knowledge organiser.

 

Once they have done this, we discuss the requirements of the question and identify which information will be useful for each paragraph. Student then use their knowledge organiser to answer the question.  The final part of the session is when students read out a paragraph from their answer and have it critiqued by other students - the student providing the critique has to comment on where they have applied knowledge successfully and where they could improve that part of their answer.

 

Students finish by rewriting one of their paragraphs after considering the points other student have made and received feedback on.