Changing what doesn't work

 

My year 12 group have been looking at specific design eras and one of the things they have to do is talk about how things that were happening in the world at the time affected the design of the time. This has always been a particularly difficult part of the work for this standard. 

I had been using the cause and effect templates on this page on my class site. I had given them links to news articles from different time eras (down the bottom of that site page), and I have given targeted help, with readings from 2 particular design eras as they were the most popular this year. I knew that this had been giving issues in previous years but decided to stick with it this year.  Below here are examples from 3 of the students in that class. You can see that they used the template to collect information but did not make the connections that they needed to make to the design that was happening at the time. 

• Student example 1
• Student example 2
• Student example 3

It was time to accept that it wasn't working, suck it up an do something different. 

I am a big fan of using SOLO Taxonomy structured templates so I decided to have a go with using a SOLO hexagons activity so the students can collect together seperate items of information and then group them together and form connections.

Here is the new set of work on the class site for this.

Here are some student examples and as you can see, they are starting to make much better connections between all the information they are collecting with their readings. (they had the same links to readings from the previous version of the exercise, but they were using the information in a different way)

• Student example 1
• Student example 2
• Student example 3

So what have I learned from this? To trust my gut when I am sure something is not working. Throw it out and move on with something else.