Scheme of Work

Norzulhilmi bin Mohamad Nagarajan A/L Maradaiyee

What is Scheme of Work?

A scheme of work is your plan of what you will teach during every lesson throughout the academic year. It is a vital and useful document which you will need to produce.

Preparation of Scheme of Work

1. Check if your place of work has a proforma. They may have a special way they like the schemes of work to be laid out, and/or have a template available. This will make your life easier.

 2. Create a word document and put a table in it, or create a spreadsheet. Give yourself 5 columns: Date, Lesson content, Key Skills (if it's embedded), Resources, and Assessment

 3. If creating a scheme of work from scratch, then create a word document and put a table in it, or create a spreadsheet. Give yourself 5 columns: Date, Lesson content, Key Skills (if it's embedded), Resources, and Assessment

 4. Begin by breaking down the year into chunks. How many modules do you need to teach? Three modules breaks down nicely into one module per term. Allow yourself a couple of weeks at the end for revision and assessment - or games. Allow a week at the start for introductory stuff.

 5. Within each module, break down into further chunks. E.g. you might break down a Sociology module on The Family into the following chunks: * Marriage & Divorce * Births & childhood * Domestic abuse * History of the family * Marxist viewpoints * Feminist viewpoints * Functional viewpoints.

 6. Decide how long you'll need for each of these chunks. If the above module is lasting one term, then you'd have about 2-3 weeks per chunk.

 7. Now within each chunk, decide what lessons you could do. Try to offer a variety of practical, theoretical, group work, single work, and teacher-led work. For the chunk on Marriage and divorce, you might have: o students draw their own family trees o Teacher explains theory and students take notes o Discuss why marriages are losing popularity o Find textbooks on marriage and create posters using the information o Look at official statistics & answer questions o Use Internet to produce leaflets o Write quizzes / crosswords for each other

 8. Do this for every chunk, and for every module, and fill in the bare bones into the 'Lesson content' column on your document

 9. Now think about what resources you'll need. Textbooks? Large paper and felt tips? Computers? Write these in the Resources column

 10. The core Key skills (in the UK) consist of: Application of number - Communication - ICT and these may have to be embedded into your curriculum. in the Family example, looking at the official statistics can count as Application of number, any discussions or essay work can count as Communication, and using the computers is your ICT.

 11. The assessment column can be filled with how you will know, after each lesson, that the information has sunk in. This may be through Q&A, written tests, by reading their posters, or by listening in to their conversations.

Sample of Scheme of Work