Lesson video

Hello everybody and welcome back again.

And this really is the final session on your active citizenship projects.

So in today's lesson, it's the second part of how to apply your knowledge from your active citizenship work into an exam situation.

And we'll be focusing today on looking at how you evaluate your role and evaluate the role of others and seeing how to write an extended answer.

It's really great to be working with you all again, and I'm looking forward to seeing some excellent work coming out of us working as a team.

As always let's try and find some nice quiet space for ourselves to complete our lesson today, that means turning off notifications if we're working on our phones or laptops, seeing if we can get a bit of space at home if possible, out of the way of other people, noise and distractions.

When you're ready, please carry on and I'll meet you in just a moment, to tell you what we need for today's lesson.

Hello everybody, and just a reminder, as I said, if you've got your notes available or when you completed your unit, on how we can make a difference in society, all those excellent notes and plans that you made about your active citizenship project investigation, you've got those on hand will 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 grab these things then please do, otherwise those of us ready to go, let's start.

So, moving on we need to think about evaluating your active citizenship project.

And this is a really important part, the examiners often like to know, how you think you've done.

Do you think you've done a successful project? How successful has it been? So it's really important that you've got some kind of idea, and if you can, some kind of evidence to prove how successful you have been.

So, if you remember we took a look at this, which is the active citizenship wheel.

And we said it was all about planning, which is just a slide, taking action, and then measuring the impact.

So it's very important that you guys are able to measure your impact, okay? So you can see the pink arrow is pointed there and that is over a third of the wheel of the measuring impact.

So it's no small part, this idea of your evaluation.

So you need to think about what difference did your action take and what impact is it creating? Now this could be a short term impact, what do you do immediately? And then it could be a longer term impact like, will this be carried on for years? Have you started, I don't know, did we start some kind of fruit and veggie garden in your school that's sold organic vegetables? So now you only use organic goods in your school kitchen or something like that.

I don't know, anything, that was completely off the top of my head, but you could come up with some other examples I'm sure in your work.

So, how do we work out what impact is then? Impact is description of the difference you've made through your citizenship action.

It includes, describing how well you achieved your targets and goals, and what you've learned through the process of taking action.

Impact can be short, medium and longer term, it can be individual or collected and it can be local national or global.

So it might be that you took part in a campaign that's happening globally, for example the Amnesty Write for Rights campaign which tries to raise awareness of human rights across the world, or it might be something that you did nationally, a campaign that works here in the UK, and you can say, well my efforts enabled this to happen.

These're the kinds of things you need to be able to talk about what your project did to help an overall campaign or how your action created a change locally in your school or in your local community.

So, how do we do this then? Did you reach your targets? You all should have written some targets when you were writing a project.

Have you met them? Haven't you met them? How do you know what difference you've made? What evidence have you got? And is there a longer lasting impact to your action? If I came to visit your school or wherever you did to action say any year's time, would I see that you've done something? If people came back to your school in 10 years' time, would there still be evidence that you had done something? What do you think? So, look back at your active citizenship project, think about what you did now, and be honest.

It doesn't matter if you didn't achieve all of your targets.

Sometimes that happens, we plan great big things and then we run out of time or things happen and we can't quite do it.

That's okay, in fact, if you can turn round to the examiner in the exam board and say, do you know what, we didn't quite get to do this because, or we didn't work this out, we thought we'd be able to do it, but we couldn't.

It's a really good evidence of learning and the exam board will really like that, okay? So the really important thing is that you can identify where things went well, and where they didn't.

And that you can say to the examiners, it didn't go well here, and I know why, and if I was going to do it again, this is what I'd do differently.

So imagine you were talking to younger year groups that were doing the exam and you said to them, okay, so don't make the mistake I did, do it like this.

Those are the kinds of things that you need to explain.

Okay, so exam boards may ask you to demonstrate your impact in a number of ways and you should have some examples to show them.

So do you remember the project team we met, when we're doing our lessons and they were doing that project on homelessness? Let's just recap with them Okay, so Tyler, Shabana, Alia and Zofia, they complete their action on homelessness, they set themselves a number of aims and targets to meet.

Once the project was over they reviewed what they'd done.

Okay.

So, one of the targets was to teach a hundred students in year seven to nine about the reasons they'd become homeless, and to try to persuade 50% in the class to tell someone else what they did.

And now they've written a little summary underneath to say what they did.

Now if you haven't done this to prepare for your exam, if you haven't looked at your aims and written a summary of okay, this is how we did it, this is what we didn't do.

That would be a really good thing for you to do, leading up to your exam, a really good piece of revision for you to do, okay? And here is target two for the group, to increase by 20% the number of people who support rough sleepers in the town.

So again, they said what they did and they said how they found out.

So, this time 80% of people responded, 60% knew how to help and 45% said they helped.

So because of their social media campaign they think, they can say there's been an uptake in the number of people who know how to support.

And that's kind of really good evidence if you can give that, then that really convinces people, like the examiners who are doing the marking, that you have had an impact.

So, you could be asked to demonstrate impact in a range of questions.

For example, these questions are in style of AQA and Edexcel, and needs to short answer questions.

So these two are only worth four marks, you don't need to write loads, but you do need to be specific.

Discuss the impact of your investigation and which element you consider the most successful.

So that would be picking on your targets, picking something that really went well and telling the examiner why it went really well.

At Edexcel, explain two impacts of your citizenship action has on your target group.

So again, two separate things on the people see a target group to remember those, they're the people that we're making a difference for.

So what impact did it two separate things that it did for them, okay? Don't let it overlap you could lose marks.

So one thing my citizenship action did was this, another thing my citizenship action did was this.

Do it in a separate little paragraph or separate bullet points so it's really clear.

Okay, so when we evaluate and reflect then, it's really important to look at our evidence, we look our conclusions, can we say overrule? Therefore my project was successful because, when we reflect we say, how can we make things better? We talk about our own involvement or your own involvement, How effective were you? And you talk about what you've learned.

How has this helped you understand, citizenship a little bit more? Do you now understand some of the ideas and concepts that you've learned and lessons? Because you use them proactively.

If you were getting involved on a rights issue do you now understand more about rights? That will be an excellent thing if you could write that in an answer.

And then you also need to say, was my research helpful? Because sometimes we go down these kind of rabbit holes, finding something interesting in research, doing lots of research about it and then finding out it didn't really help you when it came to putting your project together.

So be honest about that, if you found it difficult to research something or you researched something, but then it didn't really help.

That is the time in your evaluation question to say, yeah probably wasted time on that and I didn't really need to.

It's fine we've all done it.

I still do it all the time.

Okay.

so, just to remember then, these are the kinds of questions that Tyler, Zofia, Alia they all asked, okay? What do we want to achieve? Did we all work well together? Did we use people's strengths? Or did you ask the person that can't draw to design the posters? Did everybody play their part? What changes would you recommend, to others doing the same thing? And it's okay if you need to say that a member of your team didn't really work very hard or that you had to pick up the work that that person did, or perhaps if your team had a few personality problems and you ended up arguing a bit, this often happens when we're working together as a team, and now's the time to say, when you're evaluating your work, it's okay to say things like, yeah I was in a team with Fred and we thought we were really good friends and then we argued and we didn't get along so well and we didn't work together very well.

Or, you might say, I was in a team with my best friend and that meant that we found it quite hard to concentrate, and I'd probably been better off working with the other group because they were really focused and they would've helped me focus.

So things like that are fine to include in your evaluation.

You can be as honest as he needs to be, because the only person who's going to look at your exam, is you and the examiner, okay? So it doesn't matter.

So, a question about evaluation of your projects, is sometimes used an extended answer.

It's important you're confident, as a similar question could come up again.

An extended answer's worth 12 marks and needs detail and evidence.

It's also important to remember a good structure for your answer.

So if you've done any of the other revision lessons or the practise and what you've learned lessons you'll see that we citizenship, giving you a structure to follow, And you might remember the little BUG that I'm going to introduce you to now.

So it's really helpful if we always try and go through the same process when we're answering our questions because then it becomes second nature and it's quite easy to do, isn't it? So let's meet the BUG again, okay? So we use BUG to analyse our question.

So number one, we put a box around our command words, so the command words are the words that tell us what to do.

Number two, we underline the words and phrases that are important.

So, what do we have to write about, underline those, and then number three, as we're writing, glance back up to the question, just to make sure that we're keeping on track.

There's nothing worse as a teacher or an examiner, they're looking at an answer and realising you've just gone off-track.

You've given me all this information, but I can't mark it, right? Because it's not about the question.

So glancing back up is so important, okay? So, what've we got now then? I would like you to complete the first two tasks of BUG, around this question.

So think about your role in your citizenship action project, evaluate how successful you were individually and how successful your project was.

So that's your question, think about your role in your citizenship action project, evaluate how successful you were individually and how successful your project was.

I would like you to do the first two letters of BUG.

So box the command words, underline key words and phrases.

You've got about 30 seconds to do that, and guys so pause your video now.

Great, how did you do? So, think and evaluate, okay? So you've got to talk about, so if you think about your roles you have to be able to tell the examiner what to do and evaluate.

So you're talking about what was good and what wasn't so good.

So you could think about some scales here, okay? So think about some scales and think, okay, so was it better? Or was it worse? Or was it equal, okay? So think about clopping up the arguments on each side when you're evaluating, see how it goes.

So we're talking about your role, what you did individually, and how successful your project was overall.

So in theory, when you're evaluating, you could look at your role and you could think right, here's my scales, here's my scales, all I did everything was meant to, so I'm going up, I helped out, so other people didn't do it, they did, so I went up, completed all my work, yep, I might be at the task was really good.

So, evaluating I'm up high, I've done really well.

But then if we look at the project overall, here's your projects overall, three out of the four in the group, didn't do where they were meant to, only one out of our two aims were completed, we got in trouble for not handing things in on time.

Oh look, overall your project is going down so you could be successful up here but under here your project might not have been so successful.

So it's important to remember you have to evaluate both things in this question, okay? All right, moving on.

So when we write our essay, there's a few things that you want to think about in your structure, how you write your introduction, your arguments and your conclusion and all of this is available on your worksheet section for today's lesson.

Here's some sentence starters as well, for those of you that like to have those to hand again available on their worksheet section.

And when we structure an essay for 12 marker, think about two arguments if you agree or two arguments if you disagree.

So when you're evaluating, think two arguments to say whether this is what went well, this is what didn't go quite so well, and then come up with an overall conclusion.

When we write we look at that point, evidence, explain.

And here, it's an example from Alia who was in the homelessness team, writing what she did, okay? So, what you're going to do now, is look at how Alia has answered this question and see if you can it better.

So you'll find this in your worksheet section and what you'll need to read through it.

For those of you that would like me to read through it with you, let's go off to pause and start the work, you can stay with me, we'll read through it together.

And as you go through it ,you'll see things that Alia has done and things that Alia hasn't done, okay? So you can see she started her answer and carries on over here, but this is what an excellent answer would look like.

It would have good citizenship language, you've made reference to a range of skills that have been developed, and give examples of how you did this, show how things could have been improved, how could have Alia made her role better, show evaluation and give a strong conclusion.

So you'll be looking for all of those things in Alia's answer.

And if it's not there, you can try and make it better, so you can write.

So, using this question and Alia's answer to help you, I would like you to try and write a perfect response, okay? So those of you that are happy with what you need to do, those of you don't know you're going to take Alia's response, find it in the worksheet section and try and make it perfect, using the hints that I've given you.

You can go start that right now, pause the video and off you go.

Those of you who'd like me to read through Alia's answer with you and give you some hints and tips, we can do that right now, Okay, So, remember we're looking for Alia's role and the overall project.

Our active citizenship project aimed to teach younger students about the problem of homelessness in our local community.

In my response, I would explain my role in the team and what I did to improve our impact, and I will set out how we went about this.

So she's written an introduction, you can decide whether or not you think it's good or if she's missed anything out.

My role in the team was to organise a survey with as many key stage three pupils at our school as possible.

We asked them questions including what the effects of homelessness are, why they think people become homeless and would they tell a friend or family member about the issue? Our project was really successful.

We actually received 109 responses, which is nine more than our target of a hundred.

This is because we planned a strategy to get responses.

We asked the key stage three form tutors if we could speak to pupils about our project in their form time as well as sharing the social media slide.

We made a short presentation highlighting the key facts about homelessness people including the difference between rough sleepers and other forms of homelessness.

We then invited pupils to complete our short survey.

Now I don't know about you but I'm hearing a lot about Alia and the word we, but I don't know who she's worked with.

And she said our project was successful, but there's not much else apart from some numbers there.

So that's something you might think about trying to improve when you write this up.

Overall our survey showed 80% of pupils agreed with us, that the issue of homelessness is a priority in our local community, and that they would raise awareness of the problem with a friend or family member.

This exceeded our target of 50%.

Now what she hasn't done there is say whether she thinks that's successful or not.

I think that's probably something that could be improved.

I learned a lot through my role in the project, I needed to be really well organised and work with my action team to plan form tutor time presentation, and the survey.

I worked hard to ensure the tutor time was explained to the whole team so everyone knew their role.

She said she'd done it, but she hasn't made a decision about whether, she was successful or not there again.

Actually, she'd left us to decide.

Maybe that's something that you could think about trying to improve for her.

I also decided to test our survey questions out on a few friends before we did it for real.

Why might she do that? Perhaps you could think about that.

This was really helpful and helped us improve the questions.

We also held a rehearsal of our tutor time activity so that we could see how it worked.

We made some adjustments to our slides and this improved the impact of our action project.

Okay, that sounds really good Alia.

But why did you do it? Did it make it successful? Did it not make it successful? Do you think this was a really good thing to have done to make it successful? Perhaps that's something that you need to improve in the writing up with Alia's response everybody.

So let's remember, these are the things that we need to look at.

Has Alia got good citizenship language and keywords? Has she shown how things could be improved? Have we got evaluation? Has she said what was successful or what could be more successful? Have we even got a conclusion at the end? Perhaps that's something that's missing.

So, who is your now? Go to the worksheet section and try and rewrite some of Alia's answer.

You don't need to write the whole thing if you don't want to, just please the sections that I've just mentioned and see if you can make those better.

Welcome back everybody, let's see how you've done.

So let's see how many of these things you managed to improve or adding to Alia's answer.

Which were missing, which did you think were there? Is there good citizenship key words and explanations of the skills Alia used now in your answer? A yes or no tick will be fine.

Are there examples to support how the skills are developed? Are there suggestions of how things could be improved for next time? So that's one thing I think was missing from Alia's response.

Hopefully you managed to write them in.

Is there clear evaluation of how things went with evidence? Well, she includes some figures, doesn't she? But they probably need explaining a little bit more.

Is there a clear conclusion that answers the question? Well that was something that was missing from Alia's answer.

So hopefully you've been able to add that on and you're now looking at a really good answer to a 12 mark question.

That's a helpful format I hope for you to look at some other 12 mark answers and you could swap in some of the skills into that format and practise yourself.

Fantastic work as ever then guys real pleasure to have worked through this lesson with you today and indeed your whole active citizenship unit.

It's been great getting to know you and I'm really looking forward to hearing about all the success you have in your GCSE citizenship study exams. Don't forget practise, practise, practise, use those skills that we've talked about today, you'll find exam questions scattered throughout the two lessons on this topic and also available on the worksheet that you can download, and I've taught you as well how you can use stems to write your own questions.

So please do build that into your revision, it will be the best way for you to know what might come up on the paper and to be as successful as you can.

It's so rewarding to know that the work that you've done in creating change whether it's at school or in your community, can actually help go towards getting you the good grades that you deserve.

If you need any help ask your teachers, I know they'll be really happy to feed back to you and give you tips about how you can make your answers even better.

You can send it on to me here at Oak National I'll be really happy to see those, get your parents or carer to tag us in @OakNational, #LearnwithOak and I will be really pleased to see that with you.

So, one last time I would like to wish you very very good luck, and I hope your GCSEs go brilliantly and I look forward to seeing, citizenship results going up and up over the next year, because of all the hard work that you've been doing.

So, please take very good care of yourselves.

It's been great to work with you and I hope you really enjoyed, to completing your active citizenship work and have felt very rewarded by doing so.

Take good care now, bye-bye.