I’ve come to the end of the A Level course with my yr 13s, and we were discussing last week how they wanted to spend our last few lessons. We agreed that we needed to recap the main ideas of the course, but rather than me rattle through it, I revived an idea from a few years ago and we created giant mindmaps.
Four sheets of flipchart paper taped together created the space we needed, and I added the outline of each of the two units we’d been studying.
I explained that I wasn’t going to organise them into groups, they had to split themselves up and everyone had to be doing something. If there was anything people were unsure of, I would hold a 2 minute mini-seminar for anyone who felt they wanted it. They added ideas in pencil to start with, and after about 20 minutes it seemed people had run out of steam. So I sent the group that had worked on one mindmap over to the other, and got them to review the pencil notes, amend and reorder as necessary and then go to town with the coloured markers.
With about 15 minutes to go both groups seemed to have finished, so we pinned them to the wall and I led a review of what had been created, adding a few key points that had been missed along the way.
The feedback was quite positive, and I’ll try this again tomorrow with my other group of Yr 13s.
Next lesson we’ve agreed will be based around the ‘Wall of Uncertainty’ – where everyone will bring in questions about topics they are least confident about and we’ll try and