Lesson video

Hello everybody and welcome back.

It's lovely to see you all.

And you're getting through to the very end of your course if you are here looking at the practising what you've learned unit.

I'm really excited to see you, because if you've got to this stage, then I absolutely know that you've completed your active citizenship projects and investigations.

And I'm really hoping that you had an amazing time doing that.

So the purpose of today's lesson is to come together and talk about now you've done the hard work, how you could get the best reward possible when you sit those exam papers and let the examiners know just how brilliant you are at taking citizenship actions.

So like with any lesson, if you can, find yourself a nice quiet space, it'll be really helpful.

If you can turn off any distractions, maybe log out, you know to anything that's got notifications like Messenger and all of those kinds of things.

And if you can find somewhere quiet at home, remove anything that's disturbing you, it'll be really helpful.

I will meet you in just a moment to tell you what you need for today's lesson.

If you have got your notes available from when you completed the unit on how to make a difference in our society, you might find them useful.

And just on that note, if you've come to this lesson without completing that unit, or you haven't done the citizenship action, you're welcome to join in, but you might find it a little bit difficult to answer some of the questions.

So it's probably a good idea to go back to the unit which is in year 10 and complete that first.

Okay then, I'll see you in just a minute.

Looking forward to it.

Hello everybody, and just a reminder, as I said, if you've got your notes available from when you completed your unit on how we can make a difference in society, all of those excellent notes and plans that you made about your active citizenship project and investigation, if you've got those on hand, it'll really help you.

Something to write with will be helpful as well.

And obviously as ever, we're going to be using our brains to answer lots of questions.

If you need to pause the video now and go and grab those things, then please do.

Otherwise, those of us who are ready to go, let's start.

And the first thing I want to say just again from the beginning is for all of you, an absolutely massive congratulations.

I know from personal experience, just how hard it is to pull off an active citizenship project and you work hard and sometimes you get frustrated.

All of those things happen.

So congratulations to every single one of you sitting out there having done something towards your active citizenship project, working as part of a team or whatever it was, whatever you did, it's a really, really good accomplishment.

You can talk about it when you go for job interviews, when you apply to go to perhaps sixth form, even university, all of those kinds of things.

It's an excellent skills that you've built up, and a really brilliant experience.

I hope you're all feeling really proud of yourself.

I know your school teachers will be, and we at Oak we're really proud to have been part of that journey with you, so well done, congrats.

Okay, so what we going to do today then, guys? We're going to just recap on some of that knowledge that you've built up over these lessons.

Think about how are we're going to put those into action for our exam and also think about how do we analyse an exam question and how can we make an exam question work really well? So straight into one task for you then.

no messing around today, got lots to do.

You'll find this on your worksheet if you want to use it, otherwise you can do it on paper that you have.

You have looked at a range of skills and throughout our lessons, we talked about those.

You developed a range of skills.

Can you write down for me the skills that you developed and even if you think you didn't develop all of them, just try and recall for me as many of the skills as you can that we were trying to develop over this work, please.

There was a list, we worked through them quite frequently.

See what you can remember and pause your video now and complete this task.

Come back to me when you're ready.

Should only take you a couple of minutes.

Great, okay, so let's see how many of these you got yourselves.

If you didn't get them on your mind map, then please add them as we go.

First one then, communication skills, really important.

You've been talking to people all the way along.

Critical thinking.

Analysis.

Evaluation.

Research, you all had to do some of that.

Talk more about that in a minute.

Teamwork, very important.

Confidence.

Hope you all built that up.

Resilience, things don't always go right the first time now, do they? Creating reasoned arguments, to see why people might support you or help you.

Decision making.

Representing the views of others.

So, why does making or remembering these skills actually matter? You've done it now, you've built up those ideas.

You've done your action.

Why does it actually matter? Well, the reason is when you're taking your GCSE citizenship studies, 15% of your grade is going to be on this action that you took.

It's like a little gift, really.

We know the examiners are going to ask you about your project work and something to do with some of the things that you did around that.

Sometimes that's around the skills.

So it's really important that you remember what the skills were and you know how you developed them.

So, if you're preparing for Edexcel or AQA, you may be asked specifically in a short answer question about those skills that you've got.

You'll need to demonstrate how you used them in your investigation or project.

Your question could look a bit like this.

Explain two ways in which you demonstrated using teamwork in your active citizenship projects.

So that's quite a nice question.

It's four marks.

You just have to clearly pick two different teamwork skills.

So what did you do? How did you work with your team? Okay, so two really simple ways that you worked as part of a team.

And you explain that to the examiner.

I worked as part of a team when we were deciding what to do, we did it like this.

I worked as part of a team when we were organising our event.

My role was this.

So these kinds of things, really simple, maybe two sentences for each point, but make sure they're really clear.

So let's have a look at this in a little bit more detail.

The style of questions is very similar each year, as they begin with a stem, okay? So a stem is the command word, if you like.

You've probably heard other teachers talking about this.

So you can always have a stem at the start of your question.

And I'm going to give you a list of stems in a chart and you can create your own practise question to answer.

And one of the best ways to prepare for this GCSE on this section about your citizenship action, is literally to practise some of the questions that may come up.

It's a little trade secret guys.

Probably shouldn't be telling you this, but I'm going to anyway.

Don't let your teachers know I told you this bit, okay? But really, the only way we can hope to understand what some of the examiners set you is to write our own questions and teachers do that all the time to get you used to it.

But it's not that hard to write an exam question.

If you learn the stems and then swap in the skills like teamwork, research, evaluation, you can write your own exam questions and practise them at home.

But don't tell your teachers I told you, 'cause they make out that it's really hard, okay? So, here you go.

Here's your stems. These are standard stems that come up on all the exam boards really, where they're short answers.

So that's AQA and Edexcel.

And they're worded something along the lines like this.

They're not going to be exactly the same, 'cause the examiners have to do it a little bit differently but this is the best way that you can practise, okay? And then you look at that list of skills that we've talked about before.

So I've mentioned analysis, evaluation, teamwork, decision-making, research, communication.

Any of those could come up in your exam.

We never know which one might come up.

So it's a really good idea to practise all of the stems with all of the skills.

And remember, it's only four marks.

So it shouldn't take you more than four minutes when you actually practise it at home.

And it's a really good idea to just practise a couple everyday leading up to your exam.

So here I've given you an example of how you'd write the question.

Explain one way you developed your decision making skills during your active citizenship investigation.

So for this question, if you're practising it, you give an example of how you made the decision during your active citizenship work.

So, your task, quite simply, not even going to try and answer these questions at the moment.

What you're going to use is, ooh, what you're going to do is create a question using those stems and those skills.

You can either pause the video here, and use the chart to help you, or go onto your worksheet and you'll see that there's a copy of this chart that you can complete.

So don't worry about answering them, just try and write some questions for yourself, so you get used to what it will be like.

And then in your own time you can practise answering them.

So pause the video now and practise being an examiner.

Okay, well done everybody.

Here's a little bit of feedback to give an example of one of the questions that perhaps you might have written.

And remember there's no necessarily right or wrong ideas here.

You can do it in your own way.

So you could have used any stem and any skill in any order.

That's why there's so many questions that come up and we never know which one it could be on your paper.

And we have to think about the exam boards can do this for you, so that's why you have to be so confident with all of those skills.

So you could have created a question just like this.

Explain two reasons why communication was an important element of your active citizenship investigation, okay? So I took the stem, explain two reasons.

I took the skill, communication.

Now I could have taken the skill, teamwork.

I could have taken the skill, research.

I could have taken any other skill from that list and just popped that in, and it would still have been the kind of question you will get on an exam paper.

So you see, really easy to write your own practise questions at home.

Let's move on.

So, this is what an answer might look like when you do come to write these at home.

You can see there's two clear mini paragraphs here.

So it's very clear to the examiner that you are making two clear points, because this is where a lot of students tend to fall down.

What they try and do is write their points, but they overlap.

So it's really important that your two points are very clear.

They're both about communication, but they're about different forms of communication.

So the first one is communication is important to our investigation as we needed to work together and make sure everybody knew and understood their roles in the action project.

So the first one is talking about communication within the team.

And the second one is talking about communication when they made arrangements to meet people or organise meetings.

So the second one is talking about communication outside of the team.

So you can see there's a really clear distinction, on the one hand you've got in-team communication.

On the other hand, you have got outside of team communication.

So that's where you need to think about it.

Split it up when you're asked for two things, make sure they don't overlap.

Otherwise you could do yourself out of two marks really easily by having the right kind of answer, but they're just not quite separate enough, so do remember, split those up.

Make sure it's really clear to whoever's marking your exam paper that you've gone for two completely different reasons.

Okay.

So, next task then.

Another skill that's really important is all about research.

Now we carried out, or you carried out, hopefully two different types of research in your project.

I'd like you to write a definition of what those two different types of research were.

You can just write it in a bullet point form.

No need to worry about a big detailed paragraph, but just remember the two different types and an example of each would be perfect.

So pause your video now and complete that task.

Well done everybody.

So, primary research is information you gather for yourself about your topic.

It came from a range of sources, including interviews, surveys, polls, observation, and votes.

So you would have come and done some primary research yourself.

You might've carried out surveys.

You might have carried out polls.

You might have used a range of things to try and get some answers from people.

But it's basically whatever you did for yourself.

That was your primary research.

And you might be asked to give an example of the research that you carried out within your exam.

So what's the second type of research? I can hear you all shouting at me.

That's right.

It's secondary research.

So that means somebody else has done the research for you and you're using their hard work.

So you're basically saying, okay, well, I found this report about the topic I'm writing about.

It's really helpful.

I'm going to use that to help inform my decision.

So it might be a report from your local council.

It might be a report from a national charity.

It might be government information.

It might be something from the BBC.

It might be something from, I don't know, a local newspaper or a national newspaper, an article that's written about the topic that you're using.

Anything that can help you make your decisions.

So, where can you gather your research from? There were lots of different ways and I hope you used quite a few of them.

What I'd like you to do now is take a look at these different ideas from where we get, or where you got your research from.

And I would like you to sort them, okay? So, yep, they are all either primary or secondary sources of information.

So either on your paper or on the worksheets from today's lesson, you are going to fill out a table just like this one and fill in where each of these pieces of research fit.

So are they primary forms of research or are they secondary forms of research? Okay everyone? So you can pause your video now.

I'm just going to put the slide with all of the sources back up.

So if you want to pause on that part of the video, that will be perfect.

This should probably only take you about three minutes, really quick sorting exercise.

So, let's go.

Okay.

So here are the lists of things that you need to sort.

You can pause your video now and use those.

Okay, so how did you get on everybody? Let's take a look.

So, primary things are things that you carried out.

So hopefully that will be things like your questionnaires, surveys, interviews, and meetings.

Secondary things are carried out by the people, documentaries newspapers, charity websites, and government reports.

So if you didn't get those quite right, you can correct them as you go.

Hopefully, you know the difference now between primary and secondary, had a quick refresh of our memories there.

So, exam style questions, then.

Each board will ask questions about planning and you should practise writing answers for both primary and secondary sources.

Here's an example of an Edexcel question.

This is similar to the style of Edexcel questions that come up.

Explain two examples of when you undertook primary research in your citizenship action project.

AQA might come up with something like, summarise the secondary evidence you gathered at the research stage.

Or alternatively, they might say something like, and then underneath they say, evaluate its usefulness in relation to your issue or question.

So that's got two parts to it, that question.

You have to tell the examiner what secondary evidence you gathered.

So what research you did.

And then say how useful it was to you.

OCR give you a longer style answer to complete.

So they say using your own experience of taking citizenship action, evaluate the research for your action.

And this is a 12 marker for OCR.

So they give you some clues for what they expect you to write about here.

So with the 12 marker, you'd expect to see a longer answer talking about the research that you did, and that would include both your primary and your secondary research.

So there's different examples there of how the exam boards all expect you to be able to talk with confidence about the evidence and research that you have found from that information that you gathered.

So again, really important that leading up to your exam you go back through the notes that you made on your action project, you look at the information you gathered and it's fresh in your mind, because we don't know whether in your exam they're going to ask you about that research idea or not.

So make sure you've got that to hand.

It could come up on the paper.

Okay.

So, let's revisit planning then.

Planning your active citizenship investigation was really important, okay? It will have affected how successful you were in achieving your goal and having impact.

There's often an area the examination boards want to know more about.

For example, questions like this can be asked.

And this is again an OCR question.

Using your own experience of taking citizenship action, evaluate the planning of your citizenship action.

So this is not just about research this time, it's using the same stem though, and it's saying, can you look at your action for your planning this time.

Say how good it was.

Again, it's an extended answer.

You would get bullet points about this.

Probably looking at where your plan was successful, where it didn't go according to the plan you first set about.

Perhaps where you had to make changes to your plan.

All of those things you could include.

And AQA and Edexcel are also likely to include possible short answers on planning, but they could also include a long answer on planning as well.

So we never quite know where these skills are going to be tested, in a short answer or a long answer.

That's why you always need to be so prepared.

So here's some short answers on planning that might be the kind of thing that Edexcel or AQA come up with.

Remember the questions are similar, we don't know exactly how the examiners write them, we just look out for those stems that we can identify and you can practise writing any of these at home, if you'd like to.

Edexcel, give two methods you used to plan your citizenship action project.

Again, Edexcel.

Explain two reasons why using an action plan was important in making your citizenship action project successful.

So there, you need to decide whether or not it was successful.

AQA, explain one feature of your planning process.

So one thing that you did to plan it.

AQA, evaluate to what extent the planning of your investigation was useful in making your investigation a success.

So you have to work out how much your planning helped the success of your overall project.

Okay? So, looking at the exam board that you are going to be sitting, I'm sure you'll know this by now, I would like you to complete a planning question for one of those boards.

So if you know you're OCR, you need to complete the 12 marker.

If you're Edexcel or AQA, you can choose which of the short answer questions you would like to complete.

Okay? So, remember when you're evaluating your planning, if it ever says evaluate, you need to think about what has gone well and what could go better if you did it again.

Never be frightened when you're evaluating something to say, actually that didn't go according to plan.

I think I probably could have done it a little bit better.

That shows really good learning.

Right, so pause the video now and come back to me when you are ready.

Well done everybody.

So let's have a think about how you wrote your answer and you can do a little bit of self-assessment on these to see if you can identify the stages that you went through.

So, if it asks for two things, have you made two clear points that don't overlap? Yes or no? In four mark questions, have you given a reason, i.

e.

have you explained rather than described? So the examiners don't just want to know what happened.

They don't want necessarily a description.

They want to know the impact the planning had.

So I don't want to say we sat round and had a meeting.

That's what happened.

They want to know the result of a meeting.

Why was your planning meeting important? How did it help you? Those are the kinds of things you need to put in your answer.

And then your evaluate question, have you looked at both sides compared with another element of your project? So, if planning was really important, was it as important say as your research? Or was it as important as your communication? If your planning hadn't been so good, would other things still have happened? Or is planning the most important part of the project? Those are the kinds of questions you should be answering for six markers and indeed for the long extended 12 marker question.

So have a look at the answer you wrote, see if you could identify those sections and hopefully you can and you'll be well on the way to being confident in answering these.

Okay, so let's remember some of the methods that we took when we were dealing with active citizenship, because there were different things that we could do, weren't there, to make a difference, and make a change.

And some of them had different sort of styles.

And we just need to recap on what there are, because it's really important that you use good citizenship language while you are writing your exam paper.

So the first type of action is that you can take direct action.

So direct action is taken by individuals and groups to further their aims. It's things that you do immediately.

For example, marches, boycotts, holding a public meeting and other activities.

So some of you may have taken some direct action as part of your investigations and projects, okay? And then there is indirect action, and indirect action is using methods, for example, letter writing, making leaflets, raising awareness, petitioning, lobbying MP's and counsellors.

And normally a lot of people tend to take indirect action for their active citizenship projects, because there's a range of things that you could do here that we find a lot easier within the citizenship action sort of GCSE project availability.

So it's likely most of you will have taken some indirect action.

Although some of you may have taken some direct action as well.

But it's important if you can, when you're talking about your methods, use one of those terms and it just shows the examiners that you've got really good understanding of what you did.

So, let's think about you and what you did then, please.

What methods did you use for your action projects and which methods did you use, but then decide, no we're not going to go with that one, that's not going to work? Because again, you might be asked to explain why you chose your method and why you decided one wasn't going to work at all.

So please think about that and complete this mind map.

You can find it on your worksheet, or alternatively you can make your own copy on some paper.

This shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes, please, everyone.

And I shall see you when you have finished.

So pause the video now and I'll see you in a moment.

Fantastic.

So hopefully you found some of the ideas that I've got on here.

You may have found some more and you may have some different ones.

There's no right or wrong answer here, but here's a range to get you thinking about this.

So go into a lesson, teach the class, make a video, campaign on social media.

And that could be your school's social media.

So the intranet, things like that, that you have in schools.

Produce information slides for all the class with details on, make posters, organise donation campaigns, promote another organization's campaign to encourage people to join that.

An example of an exam question which could be written about the methods that you use, could be discuss how you decided on the method of your investigation.

So that is again about how you said this way is going to work, this way's not going to work.

And it will be about you justifying, we actually decided to go into schools, into our school and teach the year sevens about this because it worked this way.

We decided that we wouldn't run an assembly, because we thought that people paid more attention to us in the class where there's only 30, whereas an assembly where there's 250.

So it's making those kinds of judgments and explaining to the examiner those thought processes that you went through about why something was better than another, okay? Okay, that's great work today then guys.

And we've come to the end of the first part of this lesson which we'll continue in the next lesson, where we will start looking at how you answer an evaluate question all about your active citizenship work.

So you've done brilliantly today.

Well done.

I know it's really difficult sometimes to remember everything that you've done and bring it all back.

That's why it's so important that we practise these things before we go into the exam.

So, I would like you to do one more thing for me, and I'm sure you all know what it is.

And that is to pop over and complete your exit quiz now, please, before the very end of the lesson, and I look forward to seeing you in your final session on active citizenship and how to evaluate your answers in the next lesson.

Until then, take very good care of yourselves.

Bye-bye.