Working on making year 11 a bit more "independent" and interdependent

Lord of the Flies - Consolidating understanding of key chapter

Mission: To keep going trying to make them less spoon-fed/ dependent on me.

My aims:
- To get students to consolidate their understanding of the events and of characterisation in this chapter. - To have students able to discuss key linguistic features as well as analysing the structure of the chapter and its function within the novel so far.
- To have students able to discuss, prioritise, agree and divide tasks.
- To have them show their learning visually - producing a resource that can be used for revision.

So I found this picture online (WHERE FROM????? I cannot remember. Even asked Twitter but got no response.) summarising and analysing chapter 7 of Of Mice and Men.

It looks great and I wanted my students to be able to produce something just as good.

I had to make do with a last minute room change (a DT Textiles room). Anyway, I ended up printing a number of resources, including simple and more detailed summaries, revision notes from different sources and some notes on characters. All aimed to support and extend the discussion we'd had as we read the chapter in the previous lessons. I knew the simple summaries would come in handy for the least able and the few students who'd missed the previous lesson.

I quickly organised groups of 3 or 4 across these massive tables, handed out a set of notes to each group, some sugar paper and felt tips. I projected the image above and we briefly discussed why it was successful and a useful revision tool.... Quick list of Success Criteria then they were away.

I honestly couldn't believe how motivated they were to produce something as good. It was an afternoon lesson in a strange room and the level of engagement was astounding.

Groups swapped notes as and when. Not all had finished before the end but all had contributed, including those who had been away as they focused on tracing events whilst others discussed how best to sum up how themes were developed, what imagery was significant in the chapter and what the key quotations were.

It's a weird experience to feel redundant but I had ample time to circulate and support, as well as check students' learning.
I would repeat the lesson although it does involve doing a fair bit of photocopying and I couldn't help feeling like a bit of a fraud - it's hard to step back and not "teach".
The other positive was that we had great revision tool and groups were able to peer-assess and critique each others' work.

Pictures of some of the work at different stages: