"Where fun comes from"

Last week my first PGCE student finished his placement. He wrote me a lovely card which signed off with “stay passionately boring”. This is a mantra which I live by and I think is embodied by a recent tweet of mine which has taken off over half term.

Unfortunately, some people appeared to take from this that I am against any form of fun within lessons. I absolutely believe that lessons can and should be fun. However, I want this enjoyment to be rooted within enjoyment and success within the subject itself, rather than the activities which frame the content.

I began my career vehemently believing that fun activities in the classroom were the route to effective learning. Examples from my early career which I now avoid include:

• Writing a facebook page for Henry VIII.
• “Plan your own lesson” lessons (which often involved people writing “Watch a video about it.”)
• Empathy pieces (“Imagine you are...”)

There are three reasons why my focus has moved from activities to content:

1. We should be unashamedly passionate about our subjects:

The first issue I have with ‘engaging’ or ‘fun’ activities is largely ideological: I love history. I always have and I always will. I want to encourage my students to have the same passion that I have. Part of instilling this passion is demonstrating to students that my subject is fascinating on its own; it doesn’t need fancy activities or packaging to make it interesting. I feel that a lot of activities which are touted as making a subject interesting or fun are actually about saying “I know history’s boring, but here’s something to make it palatable.”

2. Cognitive load theory:

Cognitive load theory (the idea that we can only fit a certain number of ‘things’ in our working memory at any one time) has revolutionised my teaching. This is particularly evident in terms of my activities. More often than not, cross-curriciular activities or activities which are designed to be fun (“Write a rap about…”) ask pupils to think about multiple concepts at once. Take my “plan your own lesson idea”, for example: within this activity, pupils were probably thinking:

How do I use this lesson planning sheet?

What should the lesson objective be?

What does “differentiation” mean?

What activity should I plan?

How long should I get the ‘pupils’ do to this for?

What should the sheet look like?

How should I set out the slide in this presentation?

Why are the ‘pupils’ doing this?

What do I actually know about plate boundaries?

The content is there. However, it has been clouded by all of the other criteria of this task. By the time I stopped using this activity, I had tried to eliminate as many of these questions as possible to get them to focus on the content, ultimately turning the ‘lesson planning’ element into a hollow shell that appeared like a lazy attempt to dress up the content of my lesson. It took me a long time and building of my self-confidence to finally have the guts to remove the shell and leave the content.

3. The “hook”:

Some teachers who I discussed this tweet with stated that lessons need a ‘hook’ in order to get pupils engaged at the beginning of a lesson. I disagree with this from two standpoints:

If the hook is in the form of an ‘engaging’ activity: see my first and second points: activities should not be attempt to apologise for our subjects or to trick pupils into learning and activities should be focused on content as much as possible to allow the working memory to be used effectively.

If the hook is in the form of an interesting fact: I believe this method runs the risk of the “swiss roll maths” problem explained by @mrbartonmaths in “How I wish I’d taught Maths”: if an interesting fact is taught first in order to engage pupils, they are likely to remember that fact and little else from the lesson. Arguably this can be remedied by teaching the hook at the end, as suggested by @DTWillingham; I could easily teach pupils about “The Great Stink” of 1848 at the beginning of a unit on public health to get them interested. However, by teaching the unit in chronological order, ensuring that I explain the reasons behind poor public health before teaching “The Great Stink”, pupils are much more likely to feel success and be able to explain the reasons behind it, rather than just remembering that a ‘stinkwave’ swept through London.

Fun and learning are not mutually exclusive. In fact, it is the fact that I believe that learning can be fun which has led me away from ‘engaging activities.’ These activities may make a lesson appear fun on the surface but I believe that this enjoyment is ultimately skin deep. If we are to build a true love of our subjects and intrinsic motivation within our pupils, we need to look deeper. For me, the ultimate root of fun is satisfaction: I have intrinsic motivation when I feel purpose and success. Therefore, my primary objective is to mirror this: I make the learning within my lessons fun by ensuring pupils feel their lessons are purposeful and that they can and do regularly feel success.