The Challenge of Linear - Bellwork

The move to linear and the decoupling of AS is the biggest shake-up of A Levels in more than a decade presenting a huge challenge not only to students, but teachers as well.

At the end of two years,A Level students will sit exams that draw on the entire A Level teaching content and specification.

This will require a different style of teaching as teachers will need to ensure that topics covered early on in the course are revisited throughout the two years as its impossible to 'revise' two years worth of content in a few weeks at the end of the course

A simple, but effective teaching and learning strategy to allow teachers to revisit previously taught topics is bellwork.

Bellwork is simply an activity that students complete as soon as they walk into the class before the ‘bell’ actually rings for the lesson. I used to call it the early bird activity.

The idea behind bellwork is that students are engaged in an activity as soon as they enter the room and are therefore focused on the subject. Bellwork also serves a number of other useful functions. It allows you to complete other activities (checking homework, preparing the lesson etc) before the lesson 'officially' starts whilst the students are busy completing the bellwork activity. The bellwork activity does not need to relate to the lesson but can consist of material that has previously been taught.

Examples of bellwork might include:

• Quantitative Skills - Asking students to perform some calculations that were taught early on in the course
• Exam Skills Activity - A simple statement on the board, for example, the 'stem' of an answer with a range of connectives for students to use to help develop analysis
• Short exam questions

In addition to the above, I found that bellwork sets the scene for the lesson as students knew that as soon as they entered my classroom then they would be engaged in some sort of activity. The bellwork activity should last around 4 or 5 minutes.

Simple, but very, very effective….