Harris Academy | Sharing our Learning in Dundee

Within S2 Health and Wellbeing we have programmed a 7 week Choices and Challenges block. This year we wanted to develop our pupils awareness of life and learning by introducing a couple of lessons encouraging personal career planning and preparation.

To build on, and make the pupils investigation more meaningful, Harris Academy invited over 40 professionals from different occupational backgrounds / education or training to one of their Social Education classes. The volunteers were interviewed by small groups of S2 pupils. These interviews were recorded using Talk-Trakers. The Talk-Trakers were ideal for gathering evidence and the recordings (podcasts) were an excellent assessment tool as they could be shared and compared.

The experience and outcome covered is

“I am investigating different careers/occupations, ways of working, and learning and training paths. I am gaining experience that helps me recognise the relevance of my learning, skills and interests to my future life”. HWB 3-20a

Pupils have also published their pictures and podcasts to their e-portfolios.

Learning Intentions

To construct a set of questions to gather information about their visitor
To identify other post-16 routes such as Modern Apprenticeships
To identify the local college and university
To identify the links between school subjects and occupations
To anticipate future decisions in education, training or work
To identify influences on career decision making
To investigate the knowledge and skills people need at work

We found that pupils really found this experience worth while, they were completely engaged in their learning and enjoyed listening to recordings of the other groups.

I was excited to enter my newly qualified teaching year on the advent of Curriculum for Excellence in 2010, and was looking forward to delivering creative lessons throughout the curriculum.

Teaching English, I found I had endless opportunity to not only create new lessons but modify existing lesson plans. The Secondary English curriculum requires pupils to experience a wide variety of writing genres, which cover the main writing outcomes. Towards the end of the year, my S1 pupils were required to write a transactional piece. The purpose of this writing task is to convey information, and topics such as ‘how to care for a pet’ are used.

Throughout the year, I attended a few TeachMeets and listened to various speakers discuss how to motivate. In one visit, we had a speaker from the Scottish Book Trust who told us to ‘find our inner zombie,’ as the children really engaged with this current topic. Although I had discussed Zombies with my pupils when we discussed childrens’ books, or T.V. programmes, I had never integrated them into my curriculum before this writing task.

The whole school cross-curricular week was approaching, and this time the topic was Rapid Response. I chose to engage with this theme by discussing disasters with the intention of creating a transactional piece of writing.

We started off by researching past disasters, hitting reading outcomes throughout this process. The pupils engaged with the texts they were using and gathered information, summarised, organised, took notes, prioritised and created new texts (Eng 3.12a, Lit 3.14a, Lit 3.15a, Lit 3.16a, Eng 3.17a) from these pieces. We then compared environmental disasters with chemical, nuclear and man-made disasters. Using real-life examples from newspapers, the pupils then used the computers to find a story of a person who had survived these disasters.

By investigating real life stories, the pupils were able to engage with the effects of these disasters, and explore the causes of these incidents. By using these stories as stimulus and exploring other people’s rights we also hit Health and Wellbeing Outcomes. The pupils found the causes of some man-made disasters thought provoking, and we were able to have moral discussions about this.

The outcome task I set the pupils was related to the Zombie phenomenon. We moved on from disasters to discuss apocalyptic versions of disasters, focusing on The Bee Movie and more science fiction type scenarios. We discussed a zombie apocalypse at great length and the information the pupils could bring to the discussion was immense! During this discussion, we examined old ‘Protect and Survive’ adverts from previous decades, which the children found very intriguing. They discussed the various media that can be used to convey information. At this point, we delved into various types of transactional writing, which ensured the pupils could be successful in this task.

The pupils created a Microsoft Publisher brochure entitled “How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse.”

For higher ability pupils, their brochure contained a lot of writing, whereas the lower ability pupils concentrated on features of informative writing, such as bullet points, sequential instructions, and simple facts. Pupils then used ScribbleMaps to scribble on a map of Dundee and alert the public to the safe zones, water supplies, infected areas, and shelter zones. The pupils loved designing routes through their own town and engaging with local landmarks and shopping centres in order to create their map. Creating this map also served as an opportunity for assessment of understanding, literacy and cooperative working.

Each pupil gained a lot from this unit and were all engaged while creating, and then presenting their brochure. Some pupils extended this further and showed examples of what tools were needed to survive, while some focused on the basics of the task. I think making this extremely relevant tapped into some of the more disengaged pupils, and was therefore an appealing task from the start. The work speaks for itself, and I am currently using the same template for an S3 class. Watch this space…