Module 3: Community issues and citizenship

Section 1 : Exploring good citizenship

Key Focus Question: How can you use different ways of organising pupils to develop their understanding of citizenship?

Keywords: classroom organisation; large classes; assessing learning; thinking skills; citizenship; rights; responsibilities

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will have:

  • developed your skills to help you relate pupils’ previous knowledge to new knowledge about citizenship;
  • found different ways to help pupils find out about community responsibilities;
  • organised a school assembly.

Introduction

Large classes present special problems for teachers – particularly if they are multigrade classes (see Key Resource: Working with large classes [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]   and Key Resource: Working with multigrade classes). In this section, we make suggestions about using different types of classroom management for developing pupils’ understanding of citizenship.

Just telling pupils about their roles and responsibilities as citizens has much less impact than involving them in active experiences. This section helps you think about different ways to find out what they know and use this to extend their understanding.

1. Using pairs and groups to discuss rights and duties