Elect Ed Case! A resource for teaching about elections
Jonathan Gullis, who will be joining the teaching team at Blackfen in September, has put together a clever lesson about the London Mayoral elections. He created a persona, Edward Case (aka ‘ed case), who wants to become the Mayor of London, and then asked students to come up with policies and slogans to help Edward Case get elected.
Now it’s obviously a little late to use this exact lesson, but I think the format would work very well with any election, or even any problem you want your students to set about solving. Jonathan’s resources are attached below.
Lesson Plan – Blackfen Interview- Mayor of London Election 2012
How does a Mayoral Candidate get elected – Blackfen School for Girls Interview – PPT
A – Information Handout for Groups – Blackfen School for Girls Interview
B – 30 Second TV Advert Storyboard
C – Instruction Cards – Blackfen School for Girls Interview – Mayor of London Elections
How Schools Un-educate Children
Schools un-educate children.
By all but the most narrow definition of what constitutes learning, schools un-educate children.
When a child enters secondary school, by and large, she is curious, determined to succeed, resilient, confident in speaking in public, willing to give it a go, independent as a learner, willing to work with others who are not her friends, and willing to ask and answer questions.
She already possesses many of the character traits we hope our students will have when they leave school. And yet five years later, these are not the character traits you find in a typical Year 11 student. They have lost most of them, and (arguably) replaced them with just one; they know how to answer exam questions.
A few months ago we ran a project with our Year 7 students to investigate what’s going on in Syria. The project basically involved 3 steps:
- find out what’s happening in Syria by asking good questions;
- learn about the role of the United Nations through a mock UN debate on Syria;
- write to William Hague MP, the Foreign Secretary, with your views on Syria.
Over the past few weeks I’ve repeated the project with my most able Year 10 students. Have a look at the students’ work below, and try to guess which pieces were done by Year 7 students, and which by Year 10. The results are revealed below.
STEP 1 – Find out what’s happening in Syria by asking good questions:
This involves students writing down questions in response to stimulus pictures from Syria. Before they do this, I teach them about the difference between basic questions (what, where, when), and advanced questions (why, what happens next, who’s better of worse etc.). Click on the image to enlarge it.
STEP 2 – Learn about the role of the United Nations through a mock UN debate on Syria:
You can see some of the Year 7 debate in a previous blog post, but I didn’t video the Year 10 debate, partly because they were shy about being filmed, and partly because it was no contest. The Year 7s were more impressive debaters, hands down.
STEP 3 – Write to William Hague MP, the Foreign Secretary, with your views on Syria:
Below are four of the best letters – two from Year 7 students, and two from Year 10. Can you tell which are which?
RESULTS:
In Step 1, the first photo was the sheet completed by Year 10 students, and the second was completed by Year 7 students.
Here are what I think are the three best Year 7 questions:
- what must they be thinking?
- how could the situation improve?
- why aren’t they doing anything about it?
- what does the world think about this?
- are they on the side of the government?
- why is it allowed to happen?
- the Year 10s are involved in a number of GCSEs exams this term and may be distracted by that
- the impact of adolescence may be a factor – particularly in their willingness to speak in a debate
- I may have not taught the lessons to the Year 10s as well – was I unconsciously hoping they wouldn’t do so well to prove my point?
- perhaps if I had stretched the Year 10s more, they would have demonstrated higher abilities
Real Life Refugees
Over the spring holidays I visited Burma to make some short films about the changes happening there. There’s a lot to be positive about, but in the far north of the country, a vicious war has broken out between the Burmese army and an ethnic minority group called the Kachin. The conflict has forced over 50,000 Kachin villagers to flee their homes to escape gross human rights violations at the hands of the Burmese soldiers.
This short film tells the story, and we’ve used it with our students, alongside a lesson we created on refugees last year. You can download the lesson resources below, and I’ve uploaded the film to YouTube to make it easier to play in school. Watch it before you show it to your students, as some of the images are quite strong.
The lesson alone is a very powerful learning experience for students, but when you show them the film afterwards it really hits home. This is not just another lesson, it’s a tiny taste of what real people are experiencing right now.
This will be one of the resources Ben Hammond is using as part of his project to educate students in Britain about Burma. Find out more, and sponsor him to dance the length of Britain HERE.
Everyone an Entrepreneur!
A number of years ago an organisation called Make Your Mark launched a project called Make Your Mark with a Tenner. Make Your Mark lent £10 to thousands of students all over the country and challenged to make as much profit as possible with their tenner within a month. Both Make Your Mark, and the Tenner project no longer exist, but we like the project so much we’ve carried it on regardless – we’ve just borrowed the tenners from our school budget instead!
Below I have attached lesson plans and resources for the project, which I hope are self-explanatory, but it’s probably worth sharing a few simple rules we’ve developed from running the project twice.
Students must:
- sign a declaration that they will repay the loan within a fixed period of time
- not sell sweets, crisps or fizzy drinks
- not use the loan for gambling
- agree how they will split any profits among their group before they start their business
… and it’s fun to keep a leader board of the most profitable businesses!
Paper Power! Brainstorming… with a Difference
Brainstorming seems to be a standard tool in every teacher’s repertoire. Here’s my version of it, which I call ‘Paper Power!’
Students sit in a circle with an open space in the middle. They work in pairs. Each pair is given a thick pen and a small pile of A5 pieces of paper. They are given the prompt question. For example, our Year 7 students are currently planning a campaign to improve safety in our local area, so the prompt questions was: “What are the people and places that make you feel unsafe in the local area?” They then write down as many ideas as possible – one idea per sheet of paper.
When the floor is covered in ideas, you ask the students to start sorting the ideas into logical groups. Once they have done this, they can start to move the ideas to show how they link to each other, or rank them in order of importance or discuss them to tease out the thinking behind the ideas.
I love it because its participatory, active, inclusive and the students control the process and outcome, not you. You may notice in the video above, I just stand still!
Great ideas for Citizenship coursework
Our students are now completing their GCSE Citizenship coursework, and I thought I’d share some of the great projects they have come up with.
I’ll start with Blackfen’s very first International Week; an amazing week of activities entirely planned and run by students (with the support of my outstanding colleague Lola Blatch) in order to promote and recognise the contribution minority communities make to our school and community. The week culminated in an International Evening and an International Fashion Show…
The next project is a video made by a group of students who wanted to educate others about the implications of the rise in university tuition fees. They arranged for this to be shown to all our sixth form students who are about to make decisions about their futures…
The next project is a video put together by students who want to educate other young people about the reality of teenage pregnancy. Sex education is not a Citizenship topic, but it becomes one when students use their learning to change the minds and lives of others, which they hope to do with this video…
And finally, with the Olympics upon us, one group has worked with Anti-Slavery International to produce a video to highlight the risks of human trafficking during the Olympics. If you’d like to support them and sign the Slavery-Free London Pledge, click HERE.
Syria and the United Nations
While the conflict in Syria rages on, our students have been trying to find their own solution to the violence. This simple, but powerful project, has three steps:
- students learn how to ask good questions about what’s happening in Syria and why;
- then the learn about the United Nations and put this into practice in a UN debate to try to find a way out of the conflict;
- finally they will write to William Hague MP, to urge him to do whatever they think is the best way forward.
We are doing this project with our Year 7s (11-12 year old), and despite their age, they have shown a level of understanding and compassion some members of the UN seem to be lacking.
Here are the resources we created for this project, which you’re very welcome to use or adapt:
Today’s the day that Invisible Children have promised to plaster cities all over the world in posters to ‘make Joseph Kony famous’, and in doing so build pressure for his arrest and trial in the International Criminal Court. If you’ve no idea what I’m talking about about, just Google Joseph Kony, watch the film, Kony 2012 here, or follow the Guardian debate here.
I’ve shown the film to some of my students, and we’ve discussed the rights and wrongs of the campaign. I’m not planning to go into this debate here, except to make one point. Over the spring holidays I was in Burma, making a series of films on the gradual, but significant political changes taking place there. I had the privilege to meet some truly heroic individuals; pro-democracy activists who were imprisoned for years and years by the Burmese regime. People like Ko Ko Gyi, who spent almost two decades behind bars, for leading protests against the military junta.
So here’s my point. While we as Citizenship teachers should engage our students in campaigns to bring men like Joseph Kony to justice, there’s a real danger that in doing so, we simply reinforce stereotypes about foreigners as evil and/or helpless. What’s much more powerful I think, is to celebrate and support the courage and heroism of people like Ko Ko Gyi and Aung San Su Kyi who represent the very best of humanity, and epitomise what Citizenship is all about.
Here’s a short rough clip of an interview I had with Ko Ko Gyi. He ends by saying, “Life is very short. Will you use it for your own benefit, or for the benefit of your community?”
Learning How To Learn
There are dozens of books, courses and experts out there offering the answers to how to get students to become better learners. This is an area we’ve been working on for a while, and our conclusion is that, rather than give students discrete activities to build their learning skills, the first step is to give students learning projects where the focus is the learning, not the content; the process not the product. That’s what we’ve been doing recently through our Blackfen’s Got Talent project.
The project is quite straight forward – ask students to choose something they would like to be talented at, and then learn how. For more details and lesson resources, follow THIS link.
The challenge is to keep the focus on the learning itself, rather than the talent show at the end. Our students have really taken to it, and have been harassing us at break and lunch to carry on learning. How often does that happen? A few of the students’ conclusions from the project are:
- learning takes time
- you have to stick at it and don’t give up
- when you get stuck, ask for help or try to learn it in a different way
- break learning down into simple steps
- when you succeed you just want to keep on learning
- learning is fun and makes you feel good!
And a final thought – teachers often bemoan students’ inability to learn independently. The problem is, when teachers say ‘learn independently’ they really mean, ‘learn what I’ve told you to learn, but without me having to keep you on task.’ That’s not independent learning! Learning will only be independent, when students have a significant say in what or how they learn. Give them that, and I guarantee you they will learn independently. Students love to learn independently… we just don’t give them many opportunities to.
Here’s video showing some of our work:
Another great Citizenship job
I’m pleased to say that we’re looking to recruit another great Citizenship teacher to join our growing Citizenship and Power Up! team at Blackfen. This is a fantastic opportunity for a creative, enthusiastic and inspiring teacher, who is passionate about Citizenship education.
For details, click HERE.
Power Up! 