Isobel Woodger, OCR English Subject Advisor
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 GCSE and A Levels and how you, as a student, can get the most out of them.
If you’re looking for more information about how to use these resources for vocational qualifications like Cambridge Technicals, please look at our guide here.
When you get to your qualification page (GCSE Maths for example), you should see a list of options on the left-hand side. You should click on the ‘Planning and teaching’ option. If you’re on an A and AS Level qualification page, you will often see a tab in the middle of the page with two labels, so please make sure you click on the right one for A Level or for AS Level depending on what you’re studying.
I’m going to walk you through what you’ll find in each of these sections if you click on them and give you some ideas about how to use them.
We make Delivery Guides to give teachers ideas about how to teach some topics within a subject. Most of these are .pdf files (some are Word documents), which you can also download and print, as well as accessing them as web pages.
The delivery guides are most often split into three core sections:
Curriculum Content: a list of the things you need to learn that are covered by the guide with some activities like worksheets to help learn the things on the list.
Thinking Conceptually: some information about the key ideas of the topic, the most common misconceptions (things some students may find hard), and the ways this topic connects to other parts of the subject.
Thinking Contextually: a list of ideas and activities that link this topic to other bits of the subject, or ideas that link the topic to the ideas and history around the topic.
How you can use Delivery Guides:
This is where we keep documents, either Word or .pdf format, that offer teachers activities to use in their lessons with you. This usually means that there is an activity, often a form of work sheet, that is linked to a set of teacher instructions.
How you can use Teaching Activities:
This is often where we keep documents that can make things clearer for teachers like lists of terminology (subject specific words), topic guides for students or research guides. This is the least specific section so it would be best to open the document to look at the actual information inside.
How you can use Teacher Guides:
Some subjects such as Maths, have extra sections that might be worth looking at. These include:
We hope this helps you find things a little bit more easily but, if you have any questions, the email address for the subject is on the left-hand side of the subject page. 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!