See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil

This idea came from OCR
Get three volunteers from the class. They will sit at the front relatively far apart from each other. One of them will be blindfolded and will be ‘See no evil’, the other will have headphones on listening to music (at a reasonable volume but not enough to damage their hearing!) and be ‘Hear no evil’ and the other will not be allowed to speak and be ‘Speak no evil’. You each give them one piece of information from one square on Activity Sheet 4. You also inform ‘Speak no evil’ of what variable they need to find out. You give them a time limit of 5 minutes to communicate with each other all the pieces of information and they have to have a correct answer. This is a fun, end of topic activity that can be very entertaining to watch. The key is to use the whiteboards. The student who cannot see can speak and hear and similarly for the other students and their other senses. Students have to figure out a strategy to communicate their ideas to each other effectively. Remember they can write messages on their whiteboards which is crucial for the student who cannot hear or speak! You may want to do an example first. Students not involved should have access to the information you have given them and be encouraged to calculate the answer themselves. In fact you could make the rest of the class the judge of whether the particular group has succeeded in their task.

Thoughts
- students have to work as a team
- all students in team have to be involved for it to work
- what are other students in the class doing?
- does this have more impact than practising questions normally in groups?

Possible Adaptations
Although this might take a little while to explain the first time, it could be used again with other topics in small groups, where each of the roles (including teacher giving information) is taken by a set of 4 students, so all students are involved.

Mastery Assessment Idea

There was a lot of discussion on the UKMT course about the Mastery scheme of learning - I thought this idea was interesting for mastery assessment for year 7...

The Scheme of Learning is divided into 4 sections

• introduction
• shallow
• deep
• profound / mastery

And the assessment is given in exactly the same format, as shown above (sample of a double-page spread).

All students across the year sit the same test in the same time limit.

Students do whichever questions they think they can do, for example a mid set might aim to do all of columns 1 and 2, then go back and try some of column 3.

A top set might be expected to complete all columns on the paper.

I like that all students may attempt questions, for example a mid-set student if very confident with area could attempt column 4, but then perhaps might only be able to do column 1 on fractions.

Assessment scores could be a stumbling block here - you couldn't give a straight % as the lower sets would likely be very despondent with their results. We discussed the idea of normalising each set to the top mark, in the same way that some university exams are done.

Food for thought!