“I’m a boring teacher and I’m proud of it.”

I’m lucky enough that over the past three years I have worked in a school and a department which encourage teachers to regularly read books and blogs to improve their pedagogy and to develop their teaching philosophy. During this period, a number of books and blogs, such as Daniel Willingham’s excellent “Why Don’t Students Like School?”, James Theobald’s “The 5 worst education arguments by graphics” and, more recently, Ben Newmark’s blog about the use of empathy in history (“Never Live Like Common People”), have caused me to think carefully about the purpose of education and how I implement this in my classroom.

Whenever I’m planning lessons, I always like to go back through my archives to see if there’s anything I can use to save time. Unfortunately, even when looking at lessons from as early as two years ago, this has recently resulted in me loudly proclaiming “…I actually taught this rubbish?!” while I look through presentations. After some thought, I realised that my apparent change in standards is a result in a change in my philosophy. My lessons used to consist of lengthy independent projects, “challenge lessons”, in which pupils did a selection of activities and checked their answers according to an answer key, videos to ‘hook’ pupils in at the beginning of lessons, and ‘fun’ written tasks which were designed to appeal to popular culture. All of these activities were based on three core beliefs:

1. Pupils should not get their knowledge from the teacher.
2. Pupils are not capable of understanding anything which is not relevant to them.
3. Pupils do not intrinsically value education: they must be “bribed” into being engaged and learning content.

I found that this focus on ‘engagement’ also pervaded the language of my pupils. Pupils asked “Can I sit next to X? They really help me to focus”. I’ve also seen a recent example of this in a picture going around twitter which spoke about how teachers should use more group work to motivate pupils.

Over the last two years I have changed my philosophy and I have changed how I teach: I now believe that the primary purpose of education is to educate, not to entertain. Pupils should not be patronised and, where appropriate, they should be treated like adults. This means encouraging pupils to enjoy the subject for its inherent worth, rather than the engaging package it has been put in. As a result, I now base my activities on four core beliefs:

1.  I am the expert in the classroom. Pupils will benefit from my guidance and will hopefully ‘catch’ the passion I have for anything I teach.
2. All lessons need to be challenging; any unfamiliar content or subject knowledge can be explained.
3. All lessons should be planned “backwards” to ensure that challenging activities are modeled and that the required skills and knowledge are broken down into different stages. This way, pupils will feel the satisfaction of being able to complete a difficult task.

Obviously, I was not able to implement these beliefs over night or on my own; I have only been able to change my practice with the support of my school as a whole. Specifically, my school has a robust and clear behaviour system which, at its core, emphasises that the primary purpose of being in a classroom is to learn.

I like to think that the vast majority of pupils still enjoy my lessons: they don’t come skipping in singing about the joys of geography on a day to day basis, but their work shows care and a desire to improve. Ultimately, a lot of the lessons I taught early in my career stemmed from the idea that the ultimate aim of education is to make pupils happy. This often resulted in trying to achieve that goal via the path of least resistance. I'll be the first to say that an enthusiastic and happy pupil is easier to teach. However, this happiness should derive from the satisfaction that comes with a challenging curriculum, not from making happiness or engagement the ultimate goal.