Category: Revision

A-level Sociology Revision Webinars 2020 (AQA focus)

Get ahead with your A-level sociology revision with these cheap online webinars covering the entire A-level sociology specification over a 12 week period.

Please note these have been cancelled due to Coronavirus!

But I will be running the same series in 2021, from March!

A Level Sociology Revision Webinars starting March 2020

The webinars are scheduled for 19.00 every Monday (with one on a Thursday) and will run from Monday 1st of April to Monday 20th June, 2 days before the last exam (crime and deviance with theory and methods). Webinars are scheduled early so that we can get through the entire specification BEFORE the first paper (on May 20th).

NB Registration will only be open during March and the first two weeks of April, then it will close!

Schedule (please see below for a more detailed version)

  1. Thursday 26th March – Education 1
  2. Thursday 2nd April – Education 2
  3. Thursday 9th April – Families and Households 1
  4. Thursday 16th April – Beliefs in Society
  5. Thursday 3rd April – Crime and Deviance 1
  6. Thursday 30th April – Crime and Deviance 2
  7. Thursday 7th May – Research Methods
  8. Thursday 14th May – Social Theories
  9. Saturday 16th May – Education and Theory and Methods 3 (exam on 20th May )
  10. Monday 25th May – Request webinar, content TBC
  11. Monday 3rd June – Families and Beliefs 2 (exam on 2nd June)
  12. Monday 10th June – Crime and Deviance with Theory and Methods 3 (Exam on 10th June).

All of these webinars will last 50 minutes during which I will provide a brief overview of some of the content within each topic, and a discussion of at least three specific exam practice questions. Students will be able to ask questions during the Webinar, via text, and there will also be time for students to ask questions at the end.

I will be conducting the Webinars via Click Meeting, which allows students to download support materials in advance of the seminars, ask questions during the seminars via ‘chat’, and which will also allow students to review the seminar afterwards as they will be recorded and stored on the site. Recordings will be available until the 16th of June (several days after the final A-level sociology exam).

Sample of Webinar 1 from 2019

Webinar Support materials

The first eight revision Webinars are supported by a PowerPoint, revision notes and exemplar exam questions, and the education, families and methods topics (basically the first year content) have gapped revision hand-outs too, so these really are being offered at a bargain price!

Detailed Schedule..

Please click below for the full schedule (PDF)

Revise Sociology Webinars ScheduleV2

How to access the Webinars and resources

Access to all 12 Webinars is only £49.99, which is less than £5 a Webinar. 

The link will take you to a registration page for my ‘Permanent Room’ on the ClickMeeting platform. This is the room from which I will be running all revision Webinars from, every Thursday from March 26th, switching to Mondays before the exam, and one on a Saturday.

Once registered you will receive an email from ClickMeeting which will provide you with an access link which will allow you access my permanent room for March-June 2019. (NB I will only be using this at the scheduled times, as outlined in the schedule.)

Following registration I will also send you an email containing all the relevant revision resources for the 12 Webinars. These will also be downloadable during and immediately after each revision session.

Reminder emails will be sent out the day in advance of each of the 12 Webinar Revision Sessions, and also watch out for a bonus ‘introducing revision Webinars’ session on the final Monday in March, to give you an opportunity to familiarise yourself with how ClickMeeting works.

Payment is via PayPal only!

About your Tutor

I’ve taught sociology for 20 years, 16 of those in a successful sixth form college between 2002 and 2018 (10 years as Head of Department).

In 2014 I set up this blog, and managed to save enough off the back of it to quit working for the ‘man’ and now I work independently, developing non-corporate support materials to facilitate the teaching and learning of A-level sociology.

I also see myself as something of a trail-blazer in developing 16-19 online education: in 2019, we should be doing better than 20 teenagers all having to travel to a central location and then ‘sitting in a room’ for an hour or two. To my mind this all seems a bit 19th century. These Webinars are a move towards making A-level education more flexible and decentralised.

Sociology tuition online! From April 2019…

Online sociology revision webinars April to June 2019, covering the AQA A-level sociology content : education to crime and deviance!

I will be running a series of A-level sociology revision webinars from April to mid-June 2019. The focus will be on maximising marks in the three AQA sociology exams, as well as reviewing basic content across the main sociology options: education, methods, families, beliefs, crime and theories.

These Webinars will be live events, with 30-40 minutes of structured lecture/ Q n A revision supported by a PowerPoint, followed by 20 mins to deal with student questions and popular requests. Webinars will be recorded and accessible if students wish to go back over them, or if they cannot make a particular session.

The online revision sessions will be fully supported with work packs containing revision notes and activities and plenty of practice exam questions and model answers covering all of the short answer questions, the two types of 10-mark questions and the 20- and 30-mark essay questions.

I’m going to be offering access to these via a subscription through Patreon, so there will be tiered access ranging from £20 a month to £40 a month. If you subscribe to the lower tier, you get access to the revision webinars  and resources (NB this is a bargain price!), if you subscribe to the higher level tiers, you get the webinars, resources AND I will provide you with feedback to any practice exam questions you do (basically I’ll mark more essays the higher up the tiers you go).

These Webinars will run on Tuesday evenings at 19.00 GMT, with the exception of the one before the families and beliefs exam, which will be on a Monday, because paper 2 is on a Tuesday!.

There will only be 20 places available* on these webinars. Subscriptions will open on March 1st 2019, but if you want to register your interest early just drop a comment below or email me and I can make sure you get a place.

(*There are more than 30 000 students who study A-level sociology , so these are actually ver rare!)

Quality Guaranteed!

I taught sociology for 16 years between 2001-2018 until I quit recently (because I live frugally I’ve retired from full-time work early) and I’m still an AQA examiner, so I know the content of A-level sociology and the exam rules intimately. I now spend most of my ‘working time’ maintaining this blog and keeping up to date with all things sociology, A-level and exams.

Provisional Timetable

Month/ Week Content
1 April Education
08 April 2 Methods and Methods in Context
15 April 3 Theories (the theories part of theories and methods)
22 April 4 Families
29 April 1 Beliefs
6 May 2 Crime
13 May 3 Education and Theory and Methods (exam on 22nd May)
20 May 4 Education and Theory and Methods
27 May Families and Beliefs
3 June 2 Families and Beliefs (exam on 4th June)
10 June Crime and Deviance and Theory and methods (exam on 12th June)

A reminder of this years exam dates!

A level sociology exam dates 2019.png

NB the above timetable is from the AQA exam board, other boards may have different times! Click here for the AQA’s A-level timetable.

Influence the content of these webinars – Requests!

What do you want covered in these Webinars? Let me know in the comments below, and I’ll use the feedback to make sure certain topics are covered…. I know what the real bogeymen of A-level sociology are (selection, the fully social theory of deviance, green crime etc.), but I also know different students struggle with different things, so if you’re thinking of ‘attending’ and want something specific covered let me know and I’ll make sure I go over it!

 

 

A-level sociology of education summary grids

I’ve been designing some sociology of education summary grids to try and summarise the AQA’s A-level sociology of education specification as briefly as possible. I’ve managed to narrow it down to 7 grids in total covering…..

  • Perspectives on education (Functionalism etc)
  • In-school processes (labelling etc.)
  • social class and differential achievement
  • gender: achievement and subject choice
  • Ethnicity
  • Policies
  • Globalisation and education (I couldn’t fit it in anywhere else!)

Here’s a couple of them… I figure these should be useful for quick card sorts during revision lessons. And let’s face it, there is only ONE thing students love more than filling in grids, and that’s a card sort!

Perspectives on education summary grid:

sociological perspectives education.png

Education policies summary grid:

education policies.png

Of course I couldn’t resist doing fuller versions of these grids too, but more of that laters!

Radical Feminist Perspectives on Religion

Radical Feminists emphasize the patriarchal nature of some mainstream religions such as Catholicism and Islam. They argue that such religions have developed in patriarchal societies and have been ‘hijacked’ by men. Men have interpreted religious doctrines in order to justify their positions of power.

Radical Feminists also believe that religion often serves to compensate women for their second class status within religion and society more generally. For example, by providing psychological rewards if they accept their role as mothers and limit their horizons to fulfilling that role well.

However, Radical Feminists do not necessarily see religion as inherently patriarchal. Historically, for example, Goddess religions have celebrated the creative and nurturing power of the feminine. It is really men hijacking religion and downplaying the role of women in the development of some religions over the past couple of thousand years which is the problem.

It follows that women can use religion to lead fulfilling lives, but need to fight oppression within mainstream religions organisations to do so, or even to develop their own unique, individual paths to a feminine spirituality.

The mind map above summarises the following Feminist perspectives on religion. Please click the links below for more details:

Beliefs in society revision bundle for sale

If you like this sort of thing then you might like my ‘beliefs in society’ revision bundle.

The bundle contains the following:

  • Eight mind maps covering the sociological perspectives on beliefs in society. In colour!
  • 52 Pages of revision notes covering the entire AQA ‘beliefs in society’ specification: from perspectives on religion, organisations, class, gender ethnicity and age and secularisation, globalisation and fundamentalism.
  • Three 10 mark ‘outline and explain’ practice exam  questions and model answers
  • Three 10 mark ‘analyse using the item’ 10 practice exam questions and answers
  • Three 30 mark essay questions and extended essay plans.

The content focuses on the AQA A-level sociology specification. All at a bargain price of just £4.99!

I’ve taught A-level sociology for 16 years and have been an AQA examiner for 10 of those, so I know what I’m talking about, and if you purchase from me you’re avoiding all those horrible corporations that own the major A-level text books and supporting a fully fledged free-range human being, NOT a global corporate publishing company.

How have families and households become more diverse?

Brief revision notes on family diversity for A-level sociology students studying families and households.

slide showing Increasing family diversity in the UK.
Text Version of the above:

In the 1950s the ‘traditional nuclear family’ was much more common. Since then, the nuclear family has declined and other family and household types increased:

The ‘main types’ of family which have ‘replaced’ the nuclear family:

  • Reconstituted families
  • Divorce-extended families
  • Single parent families
  • Single person households
  • LAT relationships
  • Multigenerational households
  • The modified extended family
  • Shared households/ families of choice

Other forms of increasing family diversity

  • There are more cohabiting rather than married couples
  • There is more cultural (‘ethnic’) diversity
  • There are more openly same-sex couples and families
  • There is greater ‘organisational diversity’: of gender roles
  • There is greater ‘life-course diversity’
  • More adults are continuing to live with their parents

To my mind these ‘cut across’ those above: for example within many of the above categories, there is also cultural variation by ethnicity and sexuality, and the domestic division of labor. 

Signposting and related posts

A few thoughts on revising research methods

Sociology_Revision_Surveys

Here’s a general plan of how I tend to revise each research method with my students, for A level sociology, focussing on social surveys revision.

The link above is to the section of the revision hand-out I use (working through it should take about an hour).

I use very similar looking material, and pretty much the same structure (with slight modifications) for all the other research methods.

As far as I’m concerned the important tasks are in bold, the rest is just fluff to get students’ attention/ deal with those who have short attention spans.

  1. Q/A starter 1 – provide an example of the results of a social survey – what does it tell us and what are the limitations….? I quite like to introduce something new here.
  2. PPT  starter 2 – Recap the key terms and examples of social surveys – I quickly PPT over the basics of social surveys – just the definition and examples (the ones the students haven’t managed to remember themselves!)
  3. Individual task – Basic true/ false grid (statements to do with social surveys). Sometimes I’ll make this into a Kahoot or a Socrative task
  4. Student task – Strengths and limitations evaluation grids – students can basically use the answers from the true false grids – getting them to evaluate the strengths and limitations pushes them a bit further. For some topics, I’ll make this a cut and paste sentence sort.
  5. Teacher feedback – I give selected examples of how, for example, random sampling might undermine the representativeness (usually a strength) of a survey.
  6. Q/A – Applying social surveys to researching topics in education – students select on of 8-10 key research methods topics we look at and plan and develop their thoughts on how they might use surveys to research that topic
  7. Student task – exam SAQ or essay practice – it is what it is, exam practice, which I may or may not mark! For some topics this will be a marking exercise.

It’s pretty dry, but then again it’s revision – enough fun and games already, let the exam fear commence…

 

%d bloggers like this: