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Success and passion: The chicken or the egg?

I once attended a pupil panel which promised to explain the pupil perspective on good teaching. I was desperate to learn the secret ingredient which made pupils successful in my subject and choose it at GCSE. Five pupils sat at the front of the room for an hour, confidently and eloquently answering questions about different subjects. The three keywords of the session were “freedom”, “enjoyment” and “passion”, leaving me ultimately frustrated.

Ben Newmark recently tweeted one of his older blogs about enjoyment and the elusive nature of “fun” (http://bennewmark.edublogs.org/2016/11/28/are-we-having-fun/) and this nicely sums up my frustration: I have tried to attack ‘fun’ lessons from almost every angle I could think of: German murder mystery lessons to practice questions, Treaty of Versailles role plays to encourage empathy (shudder), ‘plan your own geography lesson’ lessons to try and encourage meta-cognition. There have been times when I have even resorted to posters and a DVD (the Simpsons in French, if I remember correctly). Alas, every single one of these resulted in lack-lustre work and no pupil has ever claimed that my subject was the way for them because they love a good role play.

This year, I have left behind the attempts at entertainment and ‘dressing up’ content in favour of old-school teaching with a focus on facts. I am, after all, passionately boring. Interestingly, these ‘dry’ lessons appear to result in more enthusiasm than I ever saw with my previous attempts to instil passion in pupils.


Trying to make students passionate about a subject seems to be like catching smoke: the harder we try to achieve it, the more quickly it seems to disappear from our grasp. I’d argue that this is because often we focus on the wrong thing; rather than trying to get pupils to be successful in our subjects because they enjoy them and are therefore passionate, we should enable pupils to feel legitimately successful during lessons. Pupils enjoy feeling successful and therefore, rather than creating superficial enjoyment, this should engender satisfaction which will hopefully then result in discretionary effort and a true passion for the subject.

Comments

  1. Mark Horley6 July 2017 at 22:34

    I agree and have been on a similar journey! As a maths teacher I tend to approach every lesson with an attitude that this is simply the most fascinating, beautiful thing you are going to see today and ignore any indications from pupils that they might not agree. Some might see it as relentless brainwashing, but it's more effective than the "fun" lessons I've tried over the years. Having said that I do love a game of bingo every now and then!

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