New AFL Teaching Toy

I've been thinking recently about how to improve my assessment, and particularly how to make sure that students have actually done something with the scrawly bits of purple ink I leave on their work, rather than just looking at the grade and filing the rest under "sooo not bothered"!
 
I picked up some ideas from this excellent blog post on marking, and now have a new system:

1. When students complete their work, I get them to peer assess each other's work (where possible), writing comments in green ink.
2. I then take in the work and add my marks and comments in purple ink.
3. Once I've handed it back, the students are then given a specific prep task to add improvements or corrections based on my what went well/even better if comments. They do this using red ink.
4. Finally I check these corrections, and if I think they've done enough to go up a grade, they get a purple stamp using my new toy, fresh from Amazon.

 
I also record the improved grade in my mark book, and it counts towards their term grades.

I've only been using the green-purple-red-purple system for a couple of weeks, but my AS class have responded to it very positively. I'm sure the offer of an improved grade helps! It's been an excellent way of starting a dialogue with students about how they think they've improved and where there might still be gaps in their understanding: for example, today I've realised that one EAL student is confusing a "thesis statement" in an essay with an "atheist statement". Definitely something I will now spend some time clearing up next lesson.

I'd be keen to hear any thoughts on my new system, or what systems you have worked for you in your marking and AFL?

Form Critical Crafting

My budget doesn't stretch to pearls

My Year 12s were looking at form criticism today, and the idea that the gospels are selections and arrangements of pre-existing chunks of oral tradition. I thought it might be fun to test their understanding with a spot of crafting inspired by Schmidt's "pearls on a string" analogy and my junior school "making stuff out of dry pasta" days. 

The students examined two chapters from Matthew's gospel and turned their analysis of the different gospel forms they found into a pasta necklace, with each colour representing a different form. In the necklace in the photo, the six red pieces are parables, the green piece is a pronouncement story, yellow is a "tale", and the brown pieces are miracle stories.

Next year I might tinker with the activity, not least by using dyed pasta rather hastily-coloured-in-with-markers pasta, but overall I think the results are quite pretty!

Evangelical Students Running (or Ruining) Courses?

An interesting article article about the impact that evangelical Christians are having in Religion departments in an era of increasingly student influence:

Teaching religion: my students are trying to run my course

Via the Put RE back into the English Baccalaureate facebook group.

Socratic Thinking Resources

Apologies for the slightly longer than expected period of dormancy over the summer: I've been busy with house moves and getting my brain around being head of my very own RS department. I should hopefully be able to blog a bit more regularly from now on.

I've recenly uploaded a couple of resources to the TES website, based around the idea of Socratic questioning. If you teach RS or Philosophy, you might find these useful as a way of extending the thinking of your students. If you're a student,you could use them as a prompt to help you start an internal dialogue to help you improve your answers to essay style questions.

Links to the resources are below, you'll need a TES account to view them:

Socratic Question Cards

Socratic Question Matrix