Active Schemes of Work or ‘Best Active Methods’ Manuals

Active Schemes of Work have the following features:
• They usually have an active method for each topic or sub-topic on the scheme. The teaching team considers each topic in turn, and agrees the best active method(s) for teaching it. They may agree alternative approaches for some topics. They ensure there is a sufficient variety of teaching methods. An alternative strategy is to produce a 'Best Active Methods' manual as described below.
• Time, and deliberate strategies to teach Generic Skills, that is, skills that are critical to success in assessments. These are subject specific skills and are high on Blooms Taxonomy. For example the ability to reason, write an essay, evaluate, give a presentation etc.strategies that help to make good deficiencies in prior learning.

The Active Scheme of work may also contain strategies to make good any deficiencies in prior learning in the students.
Download Active Schemes of Work.

Best Active Methods Manuals.
Alternatively the team agree the best active methods for teaching their subject, without allocating them to specific topics. This works well for English Literature for example, where the curriuculum changes from year to year. The team create a document of their chosen methods, and then each begins experimenting with those methods with which they are least familiar, being coached by the other members of the team.

Coaching in the new methods
Whether you use Active Schemes of Work or the Best Methods approach, Advanced practitioners, mentors, and Peer observation, and discussion can assist the process of team members learning to use unfamiliar methods. A useful strategy to broaden the range of strategies used by the team is Supported Experiments where team members experiment for the team with team support. (see Supported Experiments).

25 Ways for Teaching Without Talking’ and ‘Formative Teaching Methods’ on the active learning page may help you make a start on your manual, so will my book ‘Teaching Today’ which has over 100 pages on methods (see Active Learning and Downloads to get working on this).

PLEASE SEND ME YOUR BEST METHODS MANUALS! I will acknowledge their origin.

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