Classroom Management

GE07 Avoiding the Year 8 dip

Research has consistently shown that there is a dip in student performance in Year 8. After the excitement of the first year in secondary school and before the build up of pressure towards Key Stage 3 SATs many students lose focus in Year 8; teachers often need to make extra efforts in Year 9 to get them back on track. This course looks at how the lack of an external focus in Year 8 can be used as an opportunity which will enable students to adopt fresh attitudes to language use and develop important skills.

The course analyses the ways in which Year 8 students already use reading, writing and speaking listening skills and you to develop modern, relevant and exciting approaches to dealing with them in class. It will explore texting, blogging, social networking and corpus linguistics in as ways of engaging students and will enable you to include these approaches in practical and manageable schemes of work.

The 2008 dates and venues have yet to be finalised for this course. Please return to our Course Subjects page.

Objectives

By the end of the course, attendees should:

  • be able to identify the reasons for the drop in student performance in year 8.
  • understand the meaning of boredom and laziness in terms of work in English
  • have practical suggestions for planning lessons and activities that will engage students and exploit their own interests and current language use.
  • know how to set up safe, secure and manageable projects
  • understand marking and assessment issues

Who should attend

ALL Year 8 teachers

Agenda

09.30 - 10.00
  • Arrival and registration
10.00 - 11.15 - Session 1 - Year 8; what's the problem?
  • Why Year 8 students lose focus
  • What reading, writing and speaking and listening activities do students engage in by themselves?
  • Laziness and boredom - a practical example
  • How to use text messaging in the classroom - including Bluetooth
  • Writing text message poems
11.15 - 11.30
  • Break
11.30 - 13.00 - Session 2: Reading real world texts
  • Social networking sites - Facebook, MySpace and Bebo
  • Blogs and bloggers - some examples
  • Setting up a blog in the classroom - high tech and low tech approaches
  • Controlling Access and Management
  • Writing a music blog / producing a music video
13.00 - 14.00
  • Lunch
14.00 - 15.30 - Session 3 Corpus linguistics in the classroom
  • What is corpus linguistics?
  • Appropriate software
  • Developing a corpus
  • Carrying out investigations into real language – how Google can help
  • Developing your students' linguistic insights
  • Example: Investigating the language of OFSTED reports
15.30 - 16:00
  • Further resources and practical tips
  • Plenary

Notes

Course members will receive a CD-ROM containing:
  • Relevant shareware software
  • PowerPoint files used during the day
  • Lesson ideas for immediate classroom
  • Exemplar schemes of work
  • Advice on setting up small scale networks within your school