RGS Literature

For the teaching practicum period I’ve been assigned to teach Year 3 pupils in the Raffles Programme (a 6 year integrated programme culminating in the ‘A’ Levels). Currently, we are reading Lordof the Flies by William Golding, a somewhat surprising choice for a girls’ school.
The school as a whole utilizes the ‘Understanding by Design (UbD)’ model for curriculum planning. This model works by going ‘backwards’, by looking first at the outcomes to be achieved before setting assessment goals, designing lessons and selecting appropriate resources. The Lit Schemes of Work (SoW) that I have viewed will also generally link back to larger macro-conceptsthat govern academic disciplines in the Raffles Programme. For the current SoW the macro-concept selected is ‘models’, which means ‘tentative schemes or structures that correspond to real objects, events or classes of events, and that have explanatory power and communicate salient points to others’.

That said, Literature teaching and learning at Raffles Girls’ School (Secondary) is not really vastly different from what I experienced (very briefly) in other schools. Group work and class-based discussions prevail, and factual knowledge of the text is demanded of the students, but not repeatedly harped upon. Instead, focus is placed on thematic concerns and close reading. One innovative (at least to me) methodology that we are moving into, starting next Term, is the use of ‘question generation’ activities to engage the students. This method follows from a fundamental belief that only those who ask the right questions gain knowledge, and thus the focus will shift from teachers’ questioning towards guiding the students to formulate (and evaluate the value of) their own sets of questions about the text. The teachers at the school believe that this will be workable and worthwhile given that the students are of high ability.