How can students studying vocational qualifications use our teaching and learning resources?
02 February 2021
Hints and Tips - 7 minute read
Sarah Ash - Subject Advisor for health and social care
This blog was originally published on the 27 March 2020
We know that sometimes as a student, it can be hard to know where to start on an exam board website. This page is a guide to our teaching and learning resources for teaching Cambridge Technicals/Cambridge Nationals and how you, as a student, can get the most out of them.
Finding teaching and learning resources
When you get to your qualification and subject page, you should see a list of options on the left-hand side. Click on the ‘Planning and teaching’ option. On the Cambridge Technical qualification page, you will see a tab in the middle of the page with two labels, please make sure you click the right one for Level 2 or Level 3 depending on what you’re studying. Cambridge Nationals do not have these two labels.
The sections on the ‘Planning and teaching’ page that are available for every level and subject are:
- Delivery guides
- Teaching activities
- Teacher guides
There are some resources that are available for every level 3 Cambridge Technical (2016 suite)
- Project delivery approach
- Resource lists
We’re going to look at each of these sections in more detail and give you some ideas about how to use them.
Delivery guides
We make delivery guides to give teachers ideas about how to teach some topics within a subject. We have these as .pdf (sometimes a word file) which you can download and print, as well as accessing them as web pages.
These guides cover some key topics for the subject and are broken down into learning outcomes (LO). A learning outcome is the knowledge and understanding you will have when you’ve completed the activities in the delivery guide. These guides are most often split into four core sections:
- Related activities: all the other units and learning outcomes where you can find content that relates to the unit you are studying and should be included in your work/revision
- Key terms: A table of key terms for the unit and their meanings
- Misconceptions: terms/concepts/themes that you might think you know or understand but often are misunderstood.
- Suggested activities: These are ways/ideas to help you learn about a concept or theme and often there are links to resources where information could be found to help you learn it.
How you can use delivery guides:
Look at the suggested timings for each suggested activity and use these timings to create yourself a schedule (add some additional time as you’ll be doing this without your teacher/assessor). Make your schedule realistic – don’t schedule in four hours on one unit with no breaks. You won’t enjoy learning that way.
Read the suggested activity and break it down into tasks. Here’s an example from Cambridge Technical Health and Social Care, Level 3 (2016) Unit 2:
Here are suggestions of how to break the activities above down:
- Read through the activities. Highlight anything that you don’t understand. Look at the misconceptions – is there anything here to help you understand this text? If there are still terms/phrases you don’t understand, look them up. (An example is ‘protected characteristics’).
- Write a definition of equality (ask others at home with you, or message/What’s App friends for their definition)
- Go to the Government website www.gov.uk and search for their concept of equality, write it down
- Go to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and repeat as above
- Now compare all the definitions you have gathered: what are the common themes, what did you misunderstand, what did you learn
- Think about your social and community groups. In what ways is there diversity in these groups? Are there any protected characteristics you have not included?
Summarise: Write summary notes to include your definition of equality, official definitions of equality, reference your sources (so you can go back to them)
One other thought - if the activity suggests working in groups think – can you do this yourself? Could you FaceTime a friend? Is there anyone at home with you who could join in with you?
Remember to check back through the misconceptions.
Teaching activities
This is where we keep documents that offer teachers activities to use in their lessons with you. We have a few for each of the main topics you are going to cover. But there isn’t an activity for everything in the unit. They will help to give you some ideas about the ways you can explore topics and bring variety to the way you can learn and produce your work.
Don’t confuse teaching activities with the suggested activities in the delivery guides. These are separate documents.
When you open the document you will see that they are headed up ‘Lesson element’. This means that it will cover an element (part) of the knowledge you need. Teaching activities are usually divided into two parts:
- The first part are instructions and answers for the teacher/assessor
- The second part are the learning activities that would be given to you in the classroom.
How you can use the teaching activities?
Firstly, read through the teacher instructions. It will tell you what you are going to learn, and where you can find some information to support your learning with activities.
Once you’ve read the teacher instructions move on to the learning activities. This might be a case study, a worksheet or research for a presentation.
Now, if you were in the classroom the work might be broken down into groups. This is much harder when you are on your own. This is where your schedule is important – break the activity down to allow you time to do the research/reading or whatever it is the activity asks. If you are connected with friends maybe you can set up a group, share the research and present to each other. But if you are on your own and don’t have this set up available to you don’t worry – take your time, plan and enjoy the activities for their own sake.
Teacher guides
This is where we keep documents that can make things clearer for teachers. For Cambridge Technicals, for example, we have a Command Verb booklet (it contains command verbs with definitions and examples for the internally assessed units). We also have a number of skills guides on topics such as referencing, managing projects and problem solving. These guides will support you, just as they would your teachers/assessors so make use of them.
I suggest you bookmark these so that you can dip in and out of them as you need to.
Additional resources for Cambridge Technicals Level 3 (2016).
There are two more resources you will find in the teaching and learning section of the qualification page:
- Project delivery approach: These are a great resource as they provide you with a theme and a project you can undertake that will cover a range of units. You can really get stuck in knowing that what you are doing supports a number of the units you will/could be studying. At the beginning there is an explanation of the topic then it tells you all the units it supports the learning for.
The projects are broken down into modules and you are given two tables that allow you to decide which way you want to approach the project:
- By unit and learning outcome. So if you are working on Unit 1 LO2, the project will tell you which module to work on.
- By module. If you like to work through things in order and start with module 1, the project will tell you which units and which learning outcomes they link to. It’s your choice – do what works for you.
- Resource lists: These are some suggestions where you can find information to help you find out more about the units you are studying.
Hopefully this has helped you to understand how you could use the resources that we have provided for your teachers. If you’re still not sure about something then please get in touch vocational.qualifications@ocr.org.uk or @OCR_Vocational. Our subject advisors would be happy to answer your questions.
Finally, all the resources mentioned above can be found on the qualification pages of the OCR website. Just click the link and off you go!
About the author
Sarah Ash - Subject Advisor for health and social care
Sarah was a teacher of health and social care for ten years. This is her main subject area and her degree and PGCE qualifications are in this subject. She has also taught child development along with several other subjects at KS3 and moderated on the A Level Health and Social Care for another awarding body. Sarah worked in secondary schools and a sixth form college in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex teaching KS4 and KS5 and as a teacher in a care home for young people aged 16-18 and supported them in preparing to leave care. She now works as a subject advisor in our Cambridge office.