In a Skill of Choice Lesson, students identify one skill from their weekly homework sheet that they would like to improve and do one of the following to help improve their knowledge:
- Access the online webpages of Instructional Videos and Practice Questions to improve their knowledge (eg. Mathsquad.org/ks1)
- For students without devices, they could use a printed Skill Development Booklet
If additional support is required, students could either ask their teacher or a peer for help.
The two biggest challenges in the Skill of Choice Lesson, and how to overcome them are…
1. Students have difficulty choosing a skill to work on. Each Weekly Sheet is set up so all prerequisite skills for any question are covered in earlier questions. This means the best place for a student to start is at the earliest question they are “having trouble with”. So what does “having trouble with” mean? It’s a skill that they are getting wrong that they don’t know how to fix to get the correct answer.
2. Students who don’t know what to do if they get stuck. If students have watched the videos AND written down some work from the video in Step 3 then they should ask their peers or teacher to assistance. It is important that students don’t rely on you for assistance every time they get stuck. That would make this lesson completely unproductive as there are often many students who need help at one time.
To make the “ask a peer for assistance” really effective it can work well to have a table of experts list. Students volunteer to be an expert when they are comfortable enough with a skill that they could explain it to someone else. It’s nice to invite everyone in the class to be an expert on any skill they would be comfortable with, then reducing the list to 5 people per skill in a way that each student appears in a roughly even way (not always possible, but a good goal!), A sample of this is below and a template is here
