Year 9 reflection - change of technique

Today I had a massive revelation.

My co-worker was making exemplars for his year 9 technology class. I used to do this! But do not do it anymore for some strange reason. I watched him make an exemplar, and then watched him the next day proudly show me what his students had made in reponse to seeing the tactile example in front of them. He had lovely results.

My problem has been that my students are taking waaay too long to get ideas out on paper, and most of them are actually not doing anything at all. When I speak to them about it, their responses were based on the fact that they could not visualise what they had to do, and becuase they have such limited experience with both the laser and the corel draw computer programme they were finding it hard to come to an idea on their own.

So, after much discussion with them, and some feedback I assessed the situation (before the whole class failed because they were unable to get an idea before the deadline) and I made some exemplars of what they could produce for their project on the laser. Now, the students are happier and making progress in class AND most have produced an idea on screen that they can roll with.

MUCH BETTER! Lucky I had this little formative evaluation of their work before the summative and was able to get help with how to help them. Making exemplars is such an important step to helping visual learners understand the expectation AND to help with ideas. After all, research exists so that we can form ideas based on sucsessful outcomes, and I was providing them with some research.

#Criteria8 #Criteria9 #Criteria11 #Criteria2 #reflection