Pterodidactics

I’ve been quite troubled over recent months by the extent to which my pupils express the sentiment that if they are doing activities that they perceive as fun, then they do not feel they are learning as much. It seems that they have come to associate the school environment with boredom and so believe that the traditional ‘boring’ school activities are the best way to learn. I was particularly struck by this recently, when I spent quite some time planning a number of (if I do say so myself) innovative, engaging and active learning activities for a year 10 revision lesson. It was a class with some challenging behaviour, and so I also took with me to the lesson a kind of threat – that the privilege of doing those things would be withdrawn if they were not on-task, and that they would have to do past paper questions instead.

Half of the class asked to just do the exam questions and skip the fun stuff. They worked diligently and calmly. Those who were doing the other activities were disengaged and noisy. The next lesson, I gave the whole class past paper questions to do, and they produced the most on-task behaviour I’ve ever witnessed with them. The lesson after that, I tried doing a slightly more interesting activity, and they ran wild. I’m pretty sure this isn’t a behaviour management issue, and I actually have direct quotes from pupils who were involved in my research project saying that they don’t feel like they’re learning as much when they’re having fun. About 8 other student teachers at my placement school reported the same thing.

I think the fact that teachers often seem to feel the same way is troublesome. When I’ve commented on this phenomena to other teachers, they have almost universally expressed positive feelings about the students desire to knuckle-down to ‘proper’ revision. But while I can absolutely see the arguments here, I do feel uncomfortable with this idea that the most sensible way to revise is by answering exam questions. It’s no doubt a sad reflection of the complete infatuation we seem to have with examining pupils to death, such that we can stick a ‘failing’ badge on any schools that don’t exclusively focus on producing exam-passing machines. Still, I shan’t rant on that too much right now.

I refuse to allow my teaching to descend into a meaningless state in which ticking boxes is more important that real learning. I see this culture of children becoming receivers rather than producers of knowledge as an outcome of an educational environment in which the statistics say everything is OK when the pupils pass the exams. But it is most emphatically not OK with me. I’m not, of course, saying that I intend to ignore the unquestionable importance that exams have in school life. But they will always be a means to an end; not an end in themselves. I intend to use every opportunity I have to reverse the roboticisation (to coin a phrase!) of our children, to encourage them genuinely care about science and learning, and to use that to help them pass the exams.