Many schools have already started preparing for the changes to the senior curriculum and assessment, with a particular focus on Cognitive Verbs.
Cognitive Verbs signal the type of mental operations students are expected to perform when undertaking a task. Students are expected to recognise the skill and carry it out in activities, exams and assignments.
While the QCAA Cognitive Verbs are really just CCEs or key task words in disguise, some schools who have examined their teaching methods have found their teachers didn’t understand the cognitive verbs and that they hadn’t been explicitly teaching cognitive verbs to their students. As a result, the students did not understand and could not demonstrate mastery of these skills.
Teachers can address this shortfall by incorporating tasks into their lessons that explicitly focus on the Cognitive Verbs and ensure students practice recognising and demonstrating the skills.
Key task words, that mirror the Cognitive Verbs, are at the centre of the majority of Logonliteracy’s resources.
Each of the How to write what you want to say… books are split into sections focused on a single writing skill or cognitive verb. Students can view related key task words and use the sentence starters and connecting words to turn their thoughts into writing.
Pat’s Posters for Teaching Cognitive Verbs provide teachers with a comprehensive resource to plan lessons and activities around individual cognitive verbs. The posters feature question stems for teachers, descriptions of the key task words, student prompt questions, sentence starters and suggested graphic organisers that students can use to organise their thoughts and demonstrate the key task.
In coming weeks, we will be releasing Graphic Organisers that teachers can use in lessons to help and students practice different cognitive skills. These organisers will be able to be printed out for use in the classroom, allowing students to use the charts and diagrams, and prompt questions to work through a Cognitive Verb skill to plan their writing.
The Graphic Organisers, which complement Pat’s Posters, make it easier for teachers to include Cognitive Verbs exercises into lessons and assessment, ensuring students have plenty of opportunities to become familiar with and practice different Cognitive Verbs.
