5 Summary of Week 2

In this week, you have begun to identify what makes tricky topics tricky. You have learned how to carry out a needs analysis in order to identify students misunderstanding of a tricky topic and you have seen how tricky topics are made up of several assessable parts. You’ve seen how these assessable parts are called stumbling blocks and that each stumbling blocks can be identified and constructed from students’ specific problems in the topic problem examples. You have used the problem distiller to examine why students have these problems and begun to appreciate the relationship between stumbling blocks and students’ problem examples.

You should now be able to:

• identify tricky topics and their key components
• conduct a mini ‘needs analysis’ to identify students’ problems in tricky topics
• use the ‘problem distiller’ to examine why students have these problems
• begin to appreciate the relationship between stumbling blocks and students’ problem examples.

Armed with a knowledge of the difficulties that students have in tricky topics, you are now in a better position to be able to identify and break down tricky topics in practice in order that they can be dealt with appropriately. Next week you will see how to break them down effectively and use the tricky topic guide, a dedicated website which helps teachers to get to grips with the tricky topics process. Now go to Week 3 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .