Students evaluating your SOW

Every year we evaluate our SOWs – what went well, what didn’t and what we might want to include next year?  The process works and it makes for dynamic, relevant SOWs that evolve over the years to adapt to current events. 

At the end of last academic year we established a subject council for the students to express their thoughts and opinions on how they learn Science with us.  One of the roles of that council we thought, would be to evaluate our SOWs (particularly at KS3) and to have input into how to move things forward. 

Project Based KS3
I need to point out here, that we teach a very project based, contextualised KS3 – roughly broken into termly projects over Years 7 & 8 – KS3 is only two years for us – KS4 starts in Year 9.

So, here’s an example of the SOW – Around the World 

A fundamental part of our improvement plan has been to further roll out “Student Voice” and to full embrace the “Well being” agenda.  Subject council again..

I am about to finish teaching the attached Around the World SOW and am planning for a round of student feedback.   Some questions come to mind immediately:

• Should I give them the SOW as it stands?
• Do I sanitise things and make the language more accessible?
• Should I just give them a series of headings about the topics that we discussed?
• How seriously will they take the “assessment” part of things?
• Maybe I should have shared this with them BEFORE we began?

Challenged by the concept of where to go with this, I designed the feedback form below.  Click on the image or here to download a PowerPoint version of the file.

If all goes to plan, we will introduce the changes back into the SOW ready to teach next year.

Do you ask your learners to review your SOWs?
Do you have a student subject council?
How do you capture input and implement change with your SOWs?

When the feedback has been gathered, I’ll post another blog about how it went, what we learned and if I’ll do it again.