A+TARGETING+EXCELLENCE

HOW TO TEACH TO EXCELLENCE

// Some ideas to discuss with your departments //

1. Make sure that students understand the rules of the game. eg the formulas for subject endorsement in your subject

2. Teach Excellence criteria and allow them to drop down to Merit not climb up to Excellence

3. Understand the Excellence exemplars on the web and mark tougher than that standard throughout the year

4. Apply your own PEP to marks awarded during the year – particularly exams

5. Break practice externals into smaller excellence chunks and give feedback/feedforward on these smaller chunks

6. Have activities where students are placed in a competitive environment ie rank and reward the best

7. Remove the dependency on teacher notes. Insist on students finding solutions and re-processing in different ways

8. Explain internals around Excellence criteria only and teach and give feedback on the discrete aspects formatively

9. Use rubrics that are known to work for responses for specific standards eg English teachers have gained huge traction in 2011 with PEETER and MEET PEETER

10. photocopy students answers to tests/exams, where they have shown typical mistakes/misconceptions. Get the students to mark this work. This reinforces what the examiners are looking for, gets the students looking in more detail at questions and shows them the common mistakes. To extend this further, have the students write down what was missed from the answer (if they didn't get excellence)

11. Graphic organisers such as Hyerle's thinking maps to help students organise their thoughts before writing an essay.

12. good questioning techniques see below.

//The Glombots, who looked durly and lurkish, were fond of wooning, which they usually did in the grebble.// //No knowledge of Glombots is required to answer these questions.//
 * //‘What did the Glombots look like?’,//
 * //‘What were they fond of doing?’//
 * //‘Where did they like to do it?’//

13. Mind mapping so that students can see the big picture and how it all fits together.

14. Deconstructing questions to see what a question actually requires.

15. Differentiation so all students are extended reasonably.

16. FLipped classes to promote mastery.


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