Workshops

The example activity shows how you can extend an activity to include different skills which are practiced over a period of time. The key features we are interested in are how a student's piece of work, spoken or written, can be evaluated by teachers, other students, and by students themselves as part of a developmental process so that the original draft benefits and improves.

An additional attractive feature of this module is that before students even begin to write their own work, you can force them to evaluate other work. That work can be by other students, or can be chosen by the teacher to exemplify good or bad practice. That way students become sensitized to the language and structure of the writing or speech they should be emulating, or not.

Two advantages of this approach are that it saves the teacher time and attunes students to the criteria for producing a good final product. It can save the teacher time, because once the students become more critically analytical, they...