Towards a pedagogy

Contemporary theories of learning suggest that it occurs only when certain conditions have been put in place – where formal teaching is backed up with support for individual learners; where it is reinforced and consolidated after the actual ‘lesson’; and where there are formative assessment strategies to enable students to keep moving forward in their development of knowledge, growth in understanding and ability to apply knowledge gained in new contexts. In the light of this, each unit in this resource comprises:

• guidance on preparation, eg subject knowledge development material for the teacher
• activities to be used in class
• homework or extension ideas to reinforce learning.

You should find enough material in Complete RE to feel secure in the delivery of the content. For each unit, there may also be some supplementary material which will help boost your subject knowledge. In addition, a glossary is provided here so that you can check any terminology that you are unsure of.

Glossary

A resource like this can look like a full solution, but it can never replace the crucial role you have as a teacher in designing appropriate and relevant learning episodes and contextualising the work for your students. Your contribution to the effective deployment of this resource, therefore, is fundamental.

Timing

You will need to decide in your planning how much of the material is usable with your students given the amount of time you have. In a normal situation, it is expected that each unit would require about one hour with another half-hour for the homework task. If experience shows that your students will be able to cope with more, or complete the tasks more quickly, you may need to adapt your delivery, find additional materials to support learning or create more tasks. Equally, if your students require greater differentiation, you may need to be more realistic about the amount of time you set aside for each unit.