David has been extremely busy the last 10 days or so.  He’s posted a bunch of exemplars for the new course.   You will find the Paper 1 exemplars and the Paper 2 exemplars under the “Assessment (2021 exams)” heading of the site.  And today, I’ve posted the first of four individual orals that we have curated with the rest coming before August.  You can find the link here.   

The individual oral is, of course, the biggest change to the course.  It is a completely new and completely different assessment task to what we have done in the past.  For years, decades even, the IOC was a mainstay of English A courses in all their various iterations.  That is no longer the case. 

It’s important to remember that none of us have ever done this assessment before!  The example individual orals we will post are what we believe should happen (to varying degrees), but it’s really only with experience that we will learn what needs to happen and what shouldn’t happen in this assessment task.  That will take time, patience, and yes, even errors as all of us figure this out. 

Lastly, in the next few weeks, I will be finally tackling a question about “bodies of work” that was posted on the site.  I’ve delayed in responding and writing about this as I am still in the process of clarifying my thinking.  I want to get this right before I write to all of you about it and we at InThinking want to get this right as we produce materials and resources for you.

Luckily, we run a website, and our ability to rapidly shift or correct course is a huge plus in subscribing to InThinking.

Best,

Tim