What are others doing with their classes?

I've decided to try a new approach this year to ensure higher quality projects than last year. My pupils started their projects 2 weeks ago and have worked on them full time (ie 5 hours a week plus 4 hours homework). This will continue until the end of term in three weeks - just projects. They will do a bit over the Summer, mainly learning Access skills, and then we will work solidly on projects in the Autumn until they are finished, at the end of September/beginning of October.

Then we work on 2509 full time, do the exam in Jan 2003 (along with AS resits), and then work solidly on the last module until June, when they will do 2509 resits and 2511.

I guess we will be finished just in time for OCR's Project Support Pack.

By Tim Ault (Tim) on Saturday, June 29, 2002 - 07:42 am:

That sounds a very good tactic! If you really can get the projects finished in October then you'll be in a great position to tackle the theory papers. I think you may find you struggle to cover all of 2509 by January.

I tend to work on theory / projects in parallel from September - January, although theory tends to takes priority in December / January. Then we have a blitz on the projects after the January exam. This year we ended up finishing projects in March / April which meant we were very short of time on module 2511 / revision. Let's hope we can do better this year.

By Dave on Saturday, June 29, 2002 - 10:36 am:

I followed the same pattern as you last year. I felt doing the project as well as 2509 was too much to ask, and the project marks suffered as well as understaning 2509. Like you, we had little time for 2511.

I've now abandoned any dreams of getting pupils to understand what they are doing. In the projects, we focus highly on one task at a time, and they use template examples to complete a task, ensuring that it is customised to their own projects. We all do one task, then move on together.

With the modules, it will facts-led, with an emphasis on memory-recall techniques. I won't this year be pretending to teach them anything but facts because then they will have the same problems that we had this year - no time to cover all the material so no chance at getting reasonable marks in the exam.

I actually think the AS year is even more of a problem. The second paper this June was very hard for my pupils because we had little time to complete it, and I wouldn't have been able to do bits of it. I agree with the comments already made in the 2508 discussion area about Question 2 - this was a strange question that could only throw pupils from showing what they did know. And turnaround documents? - Who's ever taught that as part of a life cycle!