Education and Setting
It’s probably fair to say that most discussion of concepts like setting, streaming and banding in a-level sociology focus on things like the basic principles involved or the social and psychological consequences of different kinds of “ability grouping”. While this is, of course, a perfectly valid set of concerns (pun sort-of intended), there tends to […]
Countdown to Culture
It’s a strange-but-true factette that in the 8 years – and nearly 800 posts – this blog has been active one post has stood head-and-shoulders above all others. Quite why an innocuous little post outlining 7 Functions of Culture should have garnered 30,000-odd views in the 5 years since it was first posted is anyone’s […]
AQA GCSE Sociology: Core studies
The AQA GCSE Sociology Specification helpfully lists 25 “Core Studies” that it describes as: “A list of readily available classic and seminal texts that will help introduce students to sociology, stimulate their ‘sociological imagination’ and develop their ability to compare and contrast different sociological perspectives”. And while the Spec. is careful to point-out that “These […]
Revision Tools: Personal Learning Checklists
Personal Learning Checklists (PLCs) are a useful revision tool for both students and teachers because they allow both to identify areas of strength and weakness in an overall revision strategy: students, for example, have a list of everything they’re expected to know by way of preparation for their exams and teachers can identify any areas […]
For A Few (A-Level Sociology) Organisers More
Every now and then – between creating short-but-beautifully-crafted films and resources that both push the a-level envelope and suggest interesting new ways of doing familiar things – I like to revisit old hits as a way of reassuring myself that, when it comes to creating interest and generating those sweet, sweet, Likes, you just can’t […]
Educational Achievement and Intelligence 2
The previous post in this two-part examination of the relationship between educational achievement and intelligence focused on the questions “what is intelligence?” and how can we define it? Keeping in mind definitions of both intelligence and achievement may be socially constructed, this post looks at three broad explanations for their relationship: positive, negative and agnostic. […]
Educational Achievement and Intelligence 1
To understand how intelligence relates to educational achievement it needs to be defined; we need, in other words, to know what intelligence is before we can examine how it can be measured and subsequently related to different levels of achievement. what is intelligence? Although on the face of things intelligence might appear relatively easy to […]
BSA Video Resources
If my Inbox is any guide – which, of course, it really isn’t – the British Sociological Association has been making a concerted effort recently to “reach-out”, as we say, to A-level Sociology Teachers through their Discover Sociology off-shoot site. And by reaching-out I mean adding a steady drip of resources to those already on […]
Pygmalion in the Classroom: Revisited
Whether you’re looking generally at Education and Methods in Context or specifically at teacher expectations as an “Inside School” factor in differential achievement, a useful study to have in your locker is Rosenthal and Jacobson’s “Pygmalion in the Classroom” (1965) experiment. Accessible examples of experiments are quite rare in sociology and “Pygmalion” can be cited […]
New GCSE Sociology Knowledge Organisers
Following from a safe distance the recent batches of A-level Knowledge Organisers (A Few More A-level Sociology Knowledge Organisers and Even More Sociology A-Level Organisers) comes something similar for GCSE. These are largely for AQA but there are a couple of sets aimed specifically at WJEC/Eduqas. Chase Terrace Academy: Although I’ve previously posted Organisers for […]