Pre-Class Preparation

Pre-Class Preparation

As a brief outline – this is an 8 week course for 8-12 year olds, designed to be a basic education into law and order, specifically within the Irish legal system. The classes take place on Saturday mornings, for two and a half hours, with a fifteen minute break in the middle.

I was nervous, flattered, excited and terrified at the prospect of teaching a class, especially to gifted children. A little contextual information first.

Pupils who are exceptionally able or talented are those who have demonstrated their capacity to achieve

high performance in one or more of the following areas:

(a) General intellectual ability;

(b) Specific academic aptitude;

(c) Creative or productive thinking;

(d) Leadership ability;

(e) Visual and performing arts;

(f) Mechanical aptitude;

(g) Psychomotor ability, e.g. in athletics, gymnastics.

(from Department of Education and Science (1993) Report of the Special Education Review Committee

Available from Government Publications 01-6476834 €12.70 Catalogue No. E/109)

Gifted education has proven to be a contentious topic. It’s difficult to define whose child is ‘gifted’ and whose isn’t, but the majority of research suggests it’s children who fall into the top 5% of the population in a given area qualify for additional support. The Special Educational Support Service (SESS) suggests that there are 23,000 exceptionally able children in Ireland (population roughly 4.4 million.)

Tips for teachers of exceptionally able children include: giving the student different material than his/her peers, establish special classes for gifted children, avoidance of repetitive work, encouraging open-ended project work. I didn’t encounter much need for specialised lesson plans for students in a morning class, although some students were naturally much more willing to contribute to the class.

Over the summer from June-August, I received course outlines from previous instructors. These ranged from the incredibly sparse to the incredibly detailed. I also conducted some small initial research on the internet, including some articles on the importance of teaching law to children.

http://robfrankel.blogspot.com/2004/12/teaching-law-to-school-kids.html

“Even the youngest kids have tiny moral compasses. We should be there to assure they're accurately set from the first day of school.”

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I started really planning for this class at the beginning of September. At this point, I didn’t have a fixed syllabus for the class, beyond knowing that the first class would discuss law and order as concepts, and evolve into a lesson on the history of law, ending in 1937 with the drawing up of the Irish constitution. My main resource was The Irish Legal System, (Byrne and McCutcheon, Butterworths: 1996.) In particular, the first two chapters - Introduction To The Legal System and Development of the Irish Legal System – provided much of the information on which I planned to base my first two classes. The information is concise, accurate, and written in language that is not too difficult to comprehend. Byrne and McCutcheon would be my starting point for each of the topics I taught in the following weeks.