Miliband Moments and Cameron Cautions

I guess we would agree that talking without notes for 70 minutes is HARD – I would not like to go through an entire lesson without some prompts or reminders of what I want to cover, and I suspect that many teachers would agree. However, listening to Ed Miliband explaining why he forgot to talk about immigration and the deficit in his Conference speech last week, it occurred to me that this is not dissimilar to what students have to do in exams: they have to remember all those things they have learned and practiced, without any notes or crib sheets to help them, while working under intense pressure.

So, this gave me an idea for a lesson starter, which is rather tongue-in-cheek but it does make a point.

The game could be called Miliband Moments, and the aim is to remember key points from the previous lesson, and also to help students practice the skill of selection of the most important points in an essay rather than writing out a long list of everything they can remember.

1. Each student should have a mini whiteboard, if you have them, or a sheet of paper
2. Give them a list of three to five topics from the last lesson
3. For each topic, they have to write down the two most important things NOT to forget about it
4. Then in order to give political balance, and to encourage them to think about potential errors that they might make when writing about those topics, finish by asking them to think of a Cameron Caution – looking at the full list of topics you have given them, what is the one thing they would most NOT want to be overheard to say, or have an examiner read in their answer?
5. In other words, can they see anything that they may accidentally get wrong and so have to be particularly careful to analyse accurately.