Controlled Assessments

Starting on Tuesday 5 March, the Of Mice and Men Controlled Assessment will be run. The two official outline sheets are embedded in this post. Recent posts also give guidance on your individual preparation for this assessment. Remember – everything written on your blog will get a response before the commencement of the assessment on […]

Today we explored a stanza of Robert Burns’ Poem “To A Mouse” and discussed the intertextual relationship between its message and that of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane, In proving foresight may be vain: The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men, Gang aft agley, An’ lea’e us nought […]

As preparation for developing a piece of extended analytical writing in relation to the novel Of Mice and Men, the students explored a range of dimensions of s self-selected character and then wrote paragraphs to express their conclusions. To follow are some drafts of these paragraphs, written by students that we annotated for improvement as […]

After yesterday’s brilliant in-class dramatisation of characters from Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, everyone spent today exploring facets of a selected character – creating a compilation of information gleaned by exploring the diverse methods Steinbeck uses to reveal his characters. Everyone followed the following lines of inquiry in relation to their selected character We then […]

Alex’s Spoken Language study piece provides a good representation of what a student who is achieving higher grades needs to pursue to improve further. It’s also useful as a reference point for those working towards such grades. Here is his original work with teacher annotations. You can also visit his blog to see the process he […]

Today we explored our planning further, investigating the extent to which people’s existing plans addressed the question, and proposing some advanced approaches. Everyone was reminded that this assessment demands that they respond to the proposition in the question and take a position in favour or against it. This means the essay will be an argument […]

Using the categories we defined in class today, tonights homework is to develop a plan outlining how you’re going to respond to the Controlled Assessment question Decide on your three strongest points in response to the proposition, and then list under each of these the categories of analysis and then some specific devices, like: 1) Spoken language […]

To follow is an example of what is possible in this assessment. Your question this year is different, however the topic area is the same. This will give you some idea of how the answer can be structured and developed. My comments should assist you to identify what the assessment criteria is looking for in […]