No good RE unless pupils think for themselves.
This all means that one key feature of the "RE in Action" book is its focus on lesson ideas and learning activities as well as on outcomes and impacts. We hope readers will see clear progression in RE through the examples here, but we think it likely that teachers may gain as much from reading our examples in relation to the business of creating well-formed tasks.
To give one example, we have some work from pupils responding to their introduction to Old Testament Prophets. It would be straightforward, and not without merit, to ask them to create a factsheet or knowledge organiser of their own to include the 20 most significant pieces of information they had learned about a prophet or prophets. But the example featured here uses the question, ‘Does the world need prophets today?’ This question can’t be answered well without a rich contextual knowledge, but its premise is that pupils will deploy their knowledge in a judgement task, without a final correct answer, engaging with what they have learnt in ways that demand much of their own thinking.
There is a school in Derbyshire where the RE departmental motto is, ‘You haven’t finished your RE until you have given reasons for your own view.’ When we consider questions about RE outcomes, impacts, and assessment, as this book certainly does, it is easy for the debates to slither towards scores, data, and statistics. This book sees achievement in RE as characterised, above all, by thoughtfulness from pupils and seeks to describe the impact of the subject in light of that key insight.
Extract from the "RE in Action" book - available printed or e-book