Teaching A-Level Sociology for the First Time

ABOUT THIS COURSE

This course offers an introduction and overview to teaching the AQA A-level Sociology programme of study for anyone in their first 3 years of teaching the course, or for anyone lacking confidence in delivering the course effectively. While assessment materials will be drawn from the AQA course, many of the ideas will be applicable to other specifications.

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BENEFITS OF ATTENDING

• Provide teachers of A-level Sociology the material and confidence to teach effectively to all ability ranges
• Take away in depth understanding of the key challenge areas and how to teach them
• Gain insight into the content, the exam structure and the how exams are marked.
• Understanding of how to differentiate using scaffold and stretch strategies for essay writing

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PROGRAMME

Overview of the AQA A-level Sociology course including challenges and what to expect from pupils

10.00 – 10.45am

• Ensuring students and teachers hit the ground running in September with little or no prior learning.
• Introducing the schemes of learning for the core units and chunking down content into manageable sections and mapping to the AO’s.
• Recognising which areas will be most challenging for you and how to address these issues
• Identifying your support network and making the most of it – particularly in a small department or single teacher department.

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Break and Discussion time

10.45 – 11.00am

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Teaching Theory and Methods

11.00 – 12.30pm

• Analysis of the different structures and ways of teaching the Theory and Methods topics.
• Pitfalls and easy wins when teaching Post modernism, Sociology as a science, Social Action Theories/Interactionism
• Teaching for success, how to support students to remember key concepts and begin to apply them – interleaving and retrieval strategies
• Teaching across the ability range; Scaffolding up to ensure top students are challenged, while not leaving lower ability students behind.

In this session we will use the Scheme of Learning for Theory and Methods as a basis for the above. Giving practical advice and strategies to take back to your own classes.

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Teaching Education

12.30 – 1.00pm

• Planning for success for a mixed ability group, teaching methodologies, flipped learning and using retrieval practise to boost student performance.
• Pitfalls and easy wins when teaching, with focus on Education Policies and Differential Educational Achievement.
• Building in opportunities for students to practice exam technique in a low stake’s manner including Methods in Context.

In this session we will use the Scheme of Learning for Education as a basis for the above. Giving practical advice and strategies to take back to your own classes.

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Lunch

1.00 – 2.00pm

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Ideas for Teaching Crime and Deviance

2.00 – 2.45pm

• Developing teaching strategies to build on Year 12 that support lower attaining students and pushing the higher attaining students.
• Introduction to teaching Ethnicity and Crime and Globalisation and Crime
• How to make synoptic links obvious and build into exam answers effectively.

In this session we will use the Scheme of Learning for Crime and Deviance as a basis for the above. Giving practical advice and strategies to take back to your own classes.

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Afternoon Break

2.45 – 2.55pm

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The examination – what is expected

2.55 – 3.30pm

• Overview of all three papers by AQA, what are they looking for? What do top band essays look like?
• Focus on the 20- and 30-mark questions, specifically how to plan them and sign post the assessment objectives to the examiner.
• Scaffolding the Methods in Context question.

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Effective Feedback to Raise Attainment in the Exams

3.30 – 3.45pm

• Planning your assessments and the use of retrieval quizzes and knowledge tests.
• Feedback systems that focus on improvement rather than grades and save you time.

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Discussion & Depart

3.45 / 4.00pm

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