Reply To: Year 7 English Inquiry – Science Fictional Writing

[Jenny Toerien Keymaster]

Changes to the workbook for the 2019 iteration

I have been meaning to update this topic for some time, since we ran this inquiry for the second time in November/December this year. The advantage of running the same inquiry several years in a row (as we’ve also found with the Pressure Groups inquiry) is that it gets better each time. We kept the basic idea and structure the same but made some refinements to the inquiry journal workbook this year, and have further changes we want to make next year.

Both copies of the inquiry journal can be found here.

The main changes we made were:

1. Last year it was a ‘work in progress’ and new resources were being developed and refined throughout the 8 lessons, so when they got to the end students had to collate everything they had produced into a workbook. This wasn’t ideal and some students found they had lost some of the sheets by the end. This year we produced an A3 centre-folded workbook for each student at the start.
2. We updated the articles (not a big change – but important to do every year)
3. We added a page of basic IT instructions at the start of the Express section to help students who missed a lesson (or just the start, when the crucial instructions were given) and any who were confused and wanted written instructions to refer to.
4. The booklet had a blank space for them to stick each of their first and second drafts, which signposted from the very beginning that they needed to keep both.
5. The English Department asked us to change the Redrafting peer review page so that it matched the Constructing my toolkit page (see below). In the first year the Redrafting page had been designed to reflect what the lead English teacher expected her class to end up with in their toolkits (to save them having to rewrite this), but we all realised when we reached this lesson that different teachers wanted the freedom to teach and emphasise different tools and techniques, so it was better to leave this loose (see below for comparison).