Satisfaction and success: infinitely better than fun

Every year in terms one and two, year 9 learn about the Holocaust. It would be wrong to say that this is a topic which I enjoy teaching. However, having studied World War Two during my GCSE, my A level and my degree, it is topic which I have regularly encountered and which I find interesting.

Despite this interest, when I first started teaching the Holocaust, I found it incredibly difficult. I would spend hours sat at my computer at a loss of how to approach topics. More often than not my lessons would end up centred around opinion and big philosophical questions. My students either produced mediocre work or their written pieces were littered with misconceptions. I believe this discomfort and poor quality ultimately came down to two factors: my lack of in-depth knowledge (despite the hours spent in classrooms and lecture theatres) and the Holocaust’s extremely sensitive nature.

I felt that this topic morally precluded two, then popular, methods of teaching history: teaching through ‘fun’ or ‘engaging’ activities, such as games or empathy pieces, or the more popular (but in my mind no more acceptable) voyeuristic method, in which pupils spend weeks doing little more than marvelling at horrible photos and accounts of people who were subjected to countless atrocities.

I came to the conclusion that the most respectful approach to take was an academic one: I spent a summer reading as much as I could about the Holocaust, using A level series like “Access to History” to see how to approach it when teaching. In September, I read pupils an eyewitness account of a SS death squad and then spent the rest of the unit attempting to dissect the events, atrocities and the possible motivations behind them from an academic perspective. When teaching complex topics, I did extra research and planned out the sequence of my explanations to try and clearly explain the stages behind them.

The result was extremely successful: I found my lessons often spilled over as I either had too much to teach or I would spend too long answering insightful questions. My pupils’ analyses improved and not once did I read a paragraph which ended with “…this suggests that Hitler was bad.” My crowning glory was a pupil who asked me why I was using Karl Lüger as an example of the use of scapegoats during the Middle Ages: he was, after all, the mayor of Vienna during the Renaissance.

I did not try to make this topic interesting or gory. I taught facts, factors, and schools of thought. However, my pupils still seemed genuinely interested. I believe this came down to my change in approach: at the end of each lesson, pupils left knowing more than they did before; at 13 or 14, pupils could explain the intentionalist and functionalist schools of thought in relation to the Holocaust; when pupils wrote conclusions or expressed opinions, these were genuine thoughts, as opposed to regurgitation of sheets I had given them.

Taking an academic, knowledge-based approach to teaching history initially sprang from a moral dilemma between the delivery and content. However, my application of the same process to other topics not only prepares students well for exams and later life, but it seems to have confirmed what I see to as the two keys to long-term, intrinsic motivation: satisfaction and success. “Fun” lessons are not only often inappropriate in history, but they provide a short term reward which does nothing to engender a deep love of the subject. I shudder at the thought of describing my lessons as “fun” but I love calling them “satisfying”.