Pick your passion - inspire and engage students by teaching what inspires you

There is nothing worse than observing a lesson where the teacher is clearly apathetic about what they are teaching. They aren't engaged, and so funnily enough the students are not engaged. 

So here is my plea to curriculum designers and heads of faculty everywhere: as far as possible, allow teachers to teach their passions. Not only is this empowering for teachers, the positive knock-on effects will translate into more engaged students and better outcomes. Hattie measures teacher credibility as having a 0.9 effect size on students progress, just outside the top ten. I would argue that allowing teachers to teach what they are passionate about, therefore probably more knowledgeable about, will increase teacher credibility with students. 

I've been doubly lucky. Firstly, as a language teacher, any song, film, article, comic, play, poem or piece of writing is a potential stimulus text for teaching. I can, and do, pick whatever interests me (a recent lesson involved me having students compare a song by Tracy Chapman with the stand-up comedy of Sindhu Vee and a poem by Patience Agbabi). Secondly, even during those periods in my career when I haven't been Head of Department, I have had department heads who have encouraged and supported me in my selection of texts and teaching materials. 

I appreciate that not all subjects have such flexibility, but where the opportunity to teach your passions exists, I urge you to take it. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Feedback - picking them up and moving them on

For many, marking is the bane of the teacher's existence. I, however, love it, for it is the perfect opportunity to give feedback . Feedback is your opportunity as an educator to have a personal conversation with each student about their learning, what they did well, what they need to improve and how they can do better. As such, done well, it is a massive opportunity for you to engage students by celebrating their successes and then granting them agency to achieve meaningful goals.  So, what are the key ingredients? Given I did my PGCE in 2011, unsurprisingly I use the acronyms WWW, EBI and DIT. That is: What went well   Even better if Directed improvement task However, while many teachers tend to focus on the latter two, I want to suggest that the first one, the WWW, is actually the most important.   Put yourself in the shoes of a mid-level student: you try your hardest, really revise and prepare, put your best into a piece of work, and when that comes back all...
Read more

Beep! - an engaging reading activity for any topic

For my first post, the ultimate time-efficient reading game: Beep! It's super simple. As you read a text out loud to the class, you make deliberate mistakes e.g. you say Calcium Oxide instead of Calcium Carbonate; you swap Chile for China; you muddle etre and avoir . The students must follow along in their own copies and shout "Beep!" if/when they spot the mistake. Keep a score (you can also deduct points for premature beeping). Any one student who dominates (e.g. that sole native speaker in a class of language learners), make them the scorer or even get them to take over the reading and mistake making. This works on many levels: for a start, it's fun in way that reading a large chunk of text often isn't. However, in order to play students must read along with you. How often do we suspect/know that half the class has drifted off while you read aloud, even if you get the students to take turns? Beep gets them reading word for word! Finally, you can of cours...
Read more

Jenga! - a metaphor for how writers use tension

Image
 I love finding ways to get games into the classroom (if you've read any of my other posts, you may have noticed). It is a great way to immediately amp up the students' engagement and energy levels. Many of the others I've written about - beep, bingo, taboo - can work in any subject. This one, I'm afraid, is purely for those Literature teachers among us... Jenga is a tense game. Therefore, I use it as a metaphor for tension in a text. I literally get the students to play Jenga as we read a tense moment of a text. Favourite moments for this include: Romeo & Juliet Act 3 Scene 5; the bit with Candy's dog in Of Mice and Men ; and when Fi gatecrashes the wedding in KE Salisbury's the face that pins you . As I'm reading I call people up to take a turn. The other students will get massively distracted, but at this point you pause (maybe while a student has half pulled out a brick) and ask the students if they are enjoying the lesson. "Yes!" they ...
Read more