Plus, Minus, Interesting: A Thinking Hats Tool

If you’ve been following recent posts featuring the work of Dr. Jill Swale you’ll have come across her “Thinking Hats” activity  that’s partly designed to structure classroom discussions. If you want an activity that eases your students gently into the whole “6 Hats” process, “Plus, Minus, Interesting” is a simple evaluation exercise that uses the […]

Super Sites for Time-Starved Teachers No.2

Free AQA Sociology Course Handbook Creating a Course Handbook for your students has probably never been easier: the software’s freely available (in some cases, literally so), there’s an almost unlimited store of graphics on the web to illustrate your creation and it can all be neatly packaged in a range of handy formats – from […]

Using “Thinking Hats” to Structure Discussions

I’ve always thought Edward De Bono’s “Six Thinking Hats” (1985) is an idea that fits quite neatly with the demands placed on students in a-level sociology and psychology. Three hats speak directly to the assessment process: 1.White: facts, information known or needed. 2. Black: weaknesses, limitations and judgements. 3. Yellow: advantages and uses. The remaining […]

Education and the New Right: The 3 “C’s”

Working backwards in the alphabet, as you do, the second element to Boyd’s (1991) characterization of new Right approaches to education (the first is here if you missed it) focuses on the “3 C’s”: Character, Content and Choice. 1. Character refers to the notion of moral character and, more-importantly from a New Right perspective, how […]

Maths in Psychology

Three more documents, authored by Dr. Julia Russell and salvaged by yours-truly from the Uniview archive, these focus on the Maths in Psychology component recently introduced into the a-level the Psychology Specification. The basic format for each document is a brief outline of a specific study followed by exam-style questions and answers to these questions. […]

Education and the New Right: The 5 “D’s”

If you want a simple, straightforward and memorable (possibly) way to sum-up New Right approaches to education, you could do worse than adopt Boyd’s (1991) characterisation of the “5 Ds” of the New Right perception of the role of education and training in contemporary English / Western societies: 1. Disestablishment: The school system should be […]

Crime and Gender: Critical Thinking and Essay Writing

A third example of Jill Swale’s work, once more culled from the ATSS archive lurking in my expansive filing cabinet, is an essay-writing exercise constructed around the question: “Assess the view that the women’s crime rate, according to official statistics, is lower than men’s because of differential enforcement of the low.” The activity has three […]

Exploring the Nurture in Our Nature?

The Nature-Nurture debate in both sociology and psychology at a-level has, historically, generally been framed in terms of an either / or approach to understanding the relationship between genes and social / environmental influences. In short, either our behaviour is fundamentally a product of our genetic inheritance (biological determinism) or it is a product of […]

NotAFactsheet: More Deviance

Three new NotAFactsheets to add to your growing collection covering: 1. Interactionism (labelling theory, personal and social identities, master labels) 2. Deviancy Amplification (an outline of the model plus the role of the media) 3. Critical Theory (Instrumental and Hegemonic Marxism, Critical Subcultures) Each NotaFactsheet is available in two flavours: with and without short (1 […]

Using Analogies in Sociology

Although analogies aren’t always widely used in sociology teaching – with the exception of the organismic analogy conventionally used to introduce Functionalism and the “Warm Bath” analogy used in relation to Functionalist views on Family Life – I’ve always felt that, used carefully and with suitable warnings not to stretch them too far, they can […]