Collections 1 | Learning Mats

Following the unpredicted popularity of our two previous Collections (The Crime Collection and Shortcuts to Sociology), we’ve created a few more Collections that gather related posts on a particular theme together, the logic being to make it easier to find resources grouped around a particular interest.

And while the Search function serves a similar purpose it has a tendency to be a little over-zealous in the results it returns: the resources you’re looking for sometimes get a little lost among the similar-sounding resources you didn’t know you needed and for which you weren’t actually looking. Collections takes the guesswork out of the process by targeting the resources for which you’ve asked (even if you’re not totally sure what you’re asking for…).

Hopefully.

We’ll see how it goes.

Anyway, the first Collection involves Learning Mats, a technique that as far as A-level Sociology and Psychology teachers are concerned, doesn’t seem to have made much of a wave – or even a decent ripple come to that – despite having been around for quite a few years.

The beauty of Learning Mats, however, is that they can be used in different ways to fulfil different teaching and learning objectives: some, for example, can be used as Starters to get students to revise what’s been done in a previous lesson, while others are used as glorified worksheets for assessment tasks [sociology-gcse-assessmentmats-sample.pdf]).

Whatever you’re looking for, you might find something interesting / useful in the following:

Learning Mats: A Generic Version: This Mat template takes most of the toil out of creating simple Starter Mats for whatever it is you want to test.

Learning Mats: Some ready-made Sociology (Perspectives) and Psychology (Approaches, Psychopathology) Mats.

Methods Mat: Designed to help students evaluate different Sociological / Psychological methods.

Revision Workouts: While not a revision mat per se, these ready-made Workouts function in much the same way. Good for retrieval practice throughout a course or revision at the end of a course.

Sociology Literacy Mat: A slightly-different type of Mat involving a collection of tips, prompts, hints and reminders designed to help students get to grips with answering sociological (exam) questions

Psychology Studies Mat: Template designed to help students summarise research studies (can also be used in Sociology)

Activity Mat: Another generic Mat template that allows you to create simple classroom activities quickly and easily.

Progress Mat: A simple way to document learning within the classroom.

Paragraph Practice Mat: A Learning Mat that encourages students to practice paragraph creation. Yes. Really.