In my experience, the first term of the school year is always a great opportunity for reflection: the chorus of results day still ringing in our minds, the meetings to analyse those results and the perspective granted from a whole academic year stretched out in front of you.
This year, I find myself looking across a calendar of colours: green is for new teaching weeks; a bright turquoise represents assessment week; and the amber glow of reflective teaching week rounds out each learning cycle.
The calendar has been built not around the holidays but around students’ acquisition of new knowledge and skills, assessing it and then filling in the gaps.
But I find myself wondering what this looks like in my classroom and what tools are out there to address the challenge of assessing all my classes in one week and being ready to reflect and fill in the gaps the week after?
Our school has a digital curriculum group that leads staff through the introduction of new hardware and educational tools in the classroom, and it was while walking along the maths corridor and pondering this question with a member of the group that I was introduced to an online learning platform called Quizlet. Since then, I’ve been busy building Quizlet into my geography lessons, and through a process of trial and error have come up with some ways teachers can integrate Quizlet into their teaching.
Make revision a competition
Across our classes, we turned some mid-topic assessments into Quizlet Live. The payback was instant, cut from students slugging their way through some difficult GCSE concepts to students asking to stay in during breaktime to try and retake the test to beat the other team’s score.
Quizlet Live allows students to work in groups to answer multiple-choice questions set by the teacher. So far, so normal. However, the hook is that each group’s progress is displayed on the board and the students work in teams of three or four, with only one student having the correct answer on their device.
From my experience in the classroom, Quizlet Live builds on students’ love of collaboration and competition to create a learning experience the kids can’t fail to get excited about.
Make the most of interactive whiteboards
We’ve also used Quizlet when our shared mobile devices are all booked up. It has a great feature called Diagrams, which allows teachers to attach key terms to different parts of an image. Students then have to match key terms to the correct part of that image.
In my geography classroom, we used this as a quick knowledge check for the physical features of our case study low-income country. It worked like this: project the diagram on to the interactive whiteboard, then divide students into two teams and have them line up. Team members from each side then face off one at a time, matching physical features such as major lakes, mountain ranges, neighbouring countries and ecosystems to the correct part of the map of Uganda.
Make knowledge organisers work
With the new challenging and content-heavy GCSE, students need to learn more things than ever. With this in mind, many schools including ours have started to shift towards the effective use of knowledge organisers. Outlining to students everything they need to do so that they can work through methodically and diligently filling their heads with the relevant understanding of the GDP of Malawi and the three major atmospheric pressure cells, for example.
Quizlet has stepped in once again to support students with more engaging recall activities that also don’t add extra work for the teacher. Students can first review with one of Quizlet’s study modes. Teachers can then really simply use the test feature to create customisable quizzes that students can take online for instant marking. Assessment week suddenly seems much more manageable.
Make homework simple and effective
A particular bugbear of mine is when students submit homework during break duty, a crumpled piece of paper thrust towards you with an apology and a plethora of reasons why they managed to get it to you before the detention but not in time for the deadline. Quizlet takes care of that; I share the link to a study set with my students to complete at home and they use Quizlet Learn to study.
Quizlet helps the students build a specific study plan and, as they study, Quizlet recognises the questions students find easier or harder and adapts the revision to support them. By the time the students come into my class, their homework is done and they are ready for the in-class test.
Across the country, teachers struggle to address the pressures of work while ensuring that they continue to provide meaningful and engaging learning experiences. Quizlet has provided me and my colleagues across our academy trust with a means of setting students varied and challenging assessment activities, at the same time as giving us a little bit of our Sundays back. And that makes the rest of this academic year seem a bit more manageable.
Sebastian Witts is an assistant headteacher at the King Alfred School in Somerset. He tweets at @4ward2mars
