Skip to main content

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. 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!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knowledge Organisers: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

The term "knowledge organiser" has been used a lot over the last few years. They are a tool of which I am a passionate advocate. However, opinions of them appear to be divided; While I have met many teachers who share my passion, others have been nonplussed or told me to 'just use a revision guide'. To me, knowledge organisers are the ultimate tool of inclusion. They will never replace the benefit of being taught by an expert. However, they create a situation in which every child, regardless of special need, attendance or socio-economic status, can have access to the core knowledge they need to succeed. However, this only happens if knowledge organisers are written well; I believe, in order to realise their benefits, knowledge organisers must be focused, sequential and accessible . Accessible: Many pupils will arrive at secondary school lacking in cultural capital, with a limited vocabulary or with little experience of subjects such as history or geog...

The Battle of the Knowledge Organisers with metacognition.org.uk

The world of Knowledge Organisers is often a dichotomous one. Are you team ‘narrative’, or team ‘grid’? In this blog, Becky Sayers and Nathan Burns explore the purpose of both types, as well as their respective advantages, disadvantages and applicability across subjects. So place your bets, as the fight is about to start…!   Becky Sayers writes about the definition, purpose, advantages and disadvantages of the ‘narrative’   Knowledge Organiser. The ‘Narrative’ Knowledge Organiser Why do we use Knowledge Organisers? As a faculty, we have been using Knowledge Organisers for around seven or eight years. If I’m honest, the original reason I used them is because I was told to do so by a faculty leader in whom I had immense trust. I did not understand their overall purpose and, as a result, the pages I produced were fairly poor quality. However, over the years we have thought carefully as a team about their purpose and, as a result, the Knowledge Organisers we have produce...

Building the foundation: How I write knowledge organisers

In my last post, “Knowledge Organisers: the good, the bad and ugly”, I argued that while knowledge organisers can be a powerful tool of inclusion, they only work if they are focused, sequential and accessible . When I first started writing knowledge organisers two years ago, my attempts did not even come close to meeting these criteria. As a result, they were cluttered, unfocused and ultimately an exercise in fashion over function. Since then, I have devised a standard method to ensure that any knowledge organisers I make have an impact and can be used in the long term: Identify key knowledge. Group your facts into sections. Write your sections. Number or code your sections. Quality assure your sections. 1.        Identify key knowledge It’s easy to fall into the trap of including too much in a knowledge organiser, particularly when writing about topics we’re interested or about which we know a lot. We want to share our passion and subject...