One thing that my training stressed time and time again was the aim to encourage students to engage in higher-level thinking as much as possible. This leads to ‘better’ results and performance, apparently.
While no-one talks of deprioritising lower-level thinking skills, it is somewhat implied by the drive towards higher-level thinking skills. Certainly, my students have achieved while I have deprioritised the comprehension of texts. I still prioritise the conceptualisation of language fundamentals, though.
Despite this deprioritisation of text comprehension, this is based more on time rather than design (and the comprehension I talk of is based on the factual recall of texts rather than abstract inference by the way). Therefore, any way that I can redefine methods to prioritise the factual comprehension of texts attracts me.
Two tools that I am going to use in the coming weeks are Plickers and Kahoot. Working in a BYOD environment means that these are two time-efficient methods of testing text comprehension. See these videos and links
What’s particularly excellent about Kahoot is the competitive element built in. Having students in teams would alleviate some of the public stress of losing.
