Revision Workouts

Revision Workouts are structured revision tasks you can use throughout a course. The examples provided are for Sociology but the blank Workouts can be used for any subject that uses Assessment Objectives.

Daniel Butcher: Sociology

I’ve found it a bit difficult to evaluate the films produced by Sociology Teacher Daniel Butcher, for reasons that should become apparent, so I’m going to depart slightly from the usual blog format and just try to list some of the pluses and minuses.

Ghostsites: Wathistory

WatHistory is a YouTube site I’ve been meaning to write about but, for whatever reason, never got around to doing so until now. I guess I was inspired by the sociology ghostsites theme because this site seems to have something of a chequered history. Although the Twitter account ceased trading in 2018 and the .com website may never […]

Q and A: Does the Gender of the Teacher Matter?

The Question A popular (as in “a lot of people seem to believe it“) and recurring question around the “failing boys” discourse in education across many western societies (from Britain to America and Australia) is whether a lack of male role models, particularly in early-years education, is to blame. The Answer Supplied by Carrington, Francis, […]

More Gaps to Mind…

If you’ve read the recent Mind the Gap blog post you might be thinking: “That’s all very well and good but what would be really useful is a Pdf version of the post that’s been designed in the style of the recent Sociology Shortcuts Magazine Issue 3 with all kinds of pictures and stuff or, […]

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 […]