Curriculum, Organisation and Planning
ABREVIATIONS
SEN: Special Education Needs.
AFL: Assessment For Learning.
FFL: French as a Foreign Language.
Located in the South of Leeds, school X welcomes 1825 students, including 330 pupils in its sixth form. Most of the pupils are of white British heritage and about 5% are from other minority ethnic heritages, mainly Asian or British Indian and Pakistani.
A very small number do not have English as their mother tongue (141) and the proportion of pupils with special educational needs is 179, which is below average, as is the proportion entitled to free school meals (165 pupils). Ofsted visited the school in 2008 and reported it as satisfactory. But monitoring visits completed in 2010 showed that progress had been made by school X to improve this grade to good. Consequently, the school is very proud of these efforts as it is of its 2010 examination results.
The French lesson I decided to write about in this essay occurred in a bottom set year 8 class of 27 pupils. Four of those were SEN students.
For this essay, I chose a sequence of 3 lessons whose subjects were quite disparate: in the first lesson, we revised past tense in French; in the second one, we discovered 8 phrases of morning routine and, in the third one, we studied the time.
After several weeks working on grammar, the host teacher and I felt that the pupils needed to study something less technical than past tense and closer to their daily life. Morning routine is something they experience every day and they can relate this subject to their own life. In addition, I saw in this the opportunity to use French as the only language in the lesson, as the host teacher usually prefers to use English, arguing that this group is a bottom set class and that it is easier for them to understand if everything is translated. The last lesson of this sequence was devoted to learning time. A subject already mentioned in the lesson about
Bibliography: Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam, Inside the black box: raising standards through classroom assessment, King’s College London School of Education, 1998. Vass Andy and Hook Peter: Behaviour management Pocketbook; edition Teachers’ pocketbooks, 2010.