QUICK! Check out this great teaching idea! The Literacy speeding ticket!

#teammagicaleducator @Geoisamazing

QUICK! Check out this great idea! The Literacy speeding ticket

What inspired me to create the literacy speeding ticket?

Being a geography teacher I feel passionately about improving students literacy, and recently I have found I don’t have much choice but to consistently drive this within my lessons due to the governments new style of GCSE, which places a huge emphasis on not only literacy in geography but also mathematics. With this in mind I have been on the hunt for strategies and resources that will improve students literacy from year 7. One resource that I particularly liked which popped up over Twitter recently was a ‘speeding ticket’, the majority of which were laminated cards issued to students for rushing their work. Wanting something more specific and literacy based I thought about the structure of the ticket and how it could be adapted to invoke a ‘dialogue’ between the teacher and the student to improve literacy.

How does it work?

The need to highlight students literacy ‘violations’ lead to me creating a ticket which had easy literacy based tick boxes which clearly explained to the student why they had been caught ‘speeding’. The want to create a dialog between the student and the teacher so that the resource became purposeful for feedback, led to the creation of the ‘speed awareness course’ at the bottom of the ticket. Here students are expected to re-write the paragraph or sentence containing the literacy ‘violations’, which is then re-marked and ‘passed’ or ‘failed’.

What impact has the resource had?

As this is a new strategy so close to the end of the school year I have only had the opportunity to introduce the tickets to one class so far, however already I have noticed an improvement in how conscientious they are towards their work when the yellow tickets make an appearance. I have also shared the idea within my school and it has already been adapted for use in art. Sharing the resource across Twitter also created an interesting dialog about its use in maths, with many maths teachers considering how they could adapt the literacy violations for mathematical ones, hence this blog post.

You can download a template of a speeding ticket on the NEXT page.