Before you put an activity in front of students, ask yourself: does that activity ask them to repetitively demonstrate skills, knowledge or understanding which they may or may not already have? Or will that activity actively support the development of their skills, knowledge or understanding?
For example, you might ask yourself:
- Is the resource asking them to add missing full stops (even though you know some students’ sentence punctuation is far from secure)? Or is it teaching them when and why full stops are needed?
- Is the activity telling them that they need to use quotations (even though you know some students’ quotation choices are questionable)? Or is it helping them to understand how to select an effective quotation?
Practising insecure skills is not the same as teaching to secure those skills.
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