Teach-Secondary-Issue-14.5

“Do I have your attention…?” Colin Foster considers the question of how to get students actively engaged in what they’re meant to be learning about H ow often have you heard a colleague say, ‘ If only they were interested … ” or, “ If only they cared … ”? Teaching a roomful of students who want to learn is what many teachers went into the profession anticipating. Young people can bring so much creativity and intelligence and insight with them–when they want to apply it to their learning. But when they don’t, the process of teaching and learning can feel like wading through treacle. So how can we enable more students, more of the time, to want to learn whatever it is that they have to be taught? Beating boredom Anyone can get bored – it’s by no means exclusively an affliction of the young. It’s been rumoured that even teachers can occasionally experience brief moments of boredom during staff meetings and professional development sessions... Most adults will tend to spend the majority of their working lives thinking within a relatively narrow range of topics, which they might have a reasonable chance of being genuinely interested in. By contrast, up to the age of 16, students will be confronted daily by a bewilderingly wide array of subjects over the course of their time at school – far broader thanmost adults will encounter as part of the jobs they’ll do for most of their lifetime. Can we really expect all of our students to be fascinated by everything they have to study, all of the time? Is that reasonable? Curriculum breadth is a good thing. We don’t want young people to be pigeonholed too soon into narrow areas of learning, slaves to their current interests and kept oblivious of wider possibilities. If a general education is meant to involve learning ‘a little about a lot’, then ‘a mile wide and an inch deep’ may be exactly what school education should be. We want students to discover interests that they’ve never dreamed of, and never would have asked for, had they been allowed to design or curate their own curriculum. A cynic might even suggest that boredom is, in fact, a feature and not a bug – that the whole point of surviving school is to demonstrate that you have learned to accept doing boring things, and that this is ideal preparation for life. For me, however, that’s an extremely depressing view of education, and its potential to change and enhance young people’s lives. We should still want students to be interested in what they learn at school – but how can we achieve that? Hooking them in The most common strategy I’m aware of for getting students interested in what we're teaching them is to use their existing interests to hook them into a topic. It sounds like an obvious strategy, but I believe teachers can be surprised and disappointed that it often doesn’t seem to work too well. If, for example, a student likes football, and their maths teacher has to teach them about “Things don’t become interestingbybeingplaced next to something else that is interesting” 22 teachwire.net/secondary