Making It Up As I Go Along

Trying to make the most of the six weeks ahead and not worry too much about mixing with 300+ students a week for 50-100 minutes at a time in crowded and poorly ventilated rooms (at least I’ve had my first shot of the vaccine!) I arrived at work today with “improvisation” on my mind.

My Y13s are in the unenviable position of being forced to face a barrage of tests over the next few weeks across all their subjects to try and gather sufficient “data” to get them a “grade” in the alleged absence of this year’s external examinations (the government have basically outsourced exams to the schools rather than cancel them and schools, scared of having their final grades challenged on appeal, are largely just mimicking normal exams internally). In my subject, Philosophy, we have tried to ease their burden by minimising the number of assessment essays we are asking them to write for us and also offer their final lessons where they are meant to be “revising” as free-form philosophical chats instead. The deal is that they can ask any questions they want about the topics they are getting ready to be assessed on, but also use the time to discuss absolutely anything else philosophically that piques their interest beyond the curriculum. We call them “philosophy unleashed” lessons. I have run them for years, and they have inspired a long-running blog of mine of the same name. But when every other class is revision, revision, revision, my students seems to be enjoying these oases of provocation and intellectual stimulation even more than usual.

By the end of last term I was very disillusioned at the way we had made it a national issue amidst the pandemic to get all Year 11 and Year 13 students back into school as high priority only to then, despite all the talk of “lost learning” cease teaching them anything new and spend the remaining in-school time with them simply preparing them for assessment instead of actually educating them. It is an ever-creeping feature of my overall disillusionment with my profession that so much is dictated by an exam system more concerned with ranking and sorting students into easy to deploy categories for future job markets than in meaningfully educating them. The current situation has merely amplified an already unsatisfactory system and anything I can do to alleviate the stress it is causing my students feels like a worthwhile way to spend our time.

Today’s Philosophy Unleashed session we discussed banning “the N-word”, linking it to other offensive uses of language and free speech and offence in general. Is it possible to ban anything, let alone a word? Over the Easter break I had read both Kehinde Andrews excellent Back to Black and also David Baddiel’s Jews Don’t Count so brought in some ideas from each book and the students added their own Easter reading insights and thoughts. It was a far more interesting and thought provoking learning experience than re-hashing the topics they have already studied over and over to ensure rote memorisation and regurgitation on Friday and still, at times, inspired organic moments of legitimate revision.

Year 10 may not be involved in the current circus around assessment, but they are at the mid-way point in their own journey towards examination and in my classes we have reached the end of a topic. Because I will be prioritising getting the incoming tsunami of Year 11 and 13 papers marked over the next few weeks, the prospect of marking another 90 assessments on top of all that is not something either necessary for their immediate learning or healthy for my wellbeing. I decided over Easter therefore to set them the expected end of topic test online instead of doing it in class today on their first day back, so that they can access it at a more leisurely pace and, importantly, I can keep them waiting in the ether of the internet to be marked when I get the opportunity without worrying about losing their work in the intervening weeks. I explained this to them explicitly and told them that we would be using today’s lesson instead for revision, to give them the best possible chances of doing well when they sit down to answer the test questions. But I then gave them the power to determine how that revision would take place, asking them how they felt the time would be best spent.

I had two different Year 10 classes across the day and each class took a very different approach. The first all agreed that the best revision for them would be a Kahoot quiz. If you don’t know what Kahoot is, it’s a fun way of putting together some multiple choice quizzes which students can access on their phones. However, as a learning tool it is also fairly limited as, being multiple choice and something you can click A, B, C, or D to on a phone, it cannot go very deep with student responses. The kids like it because they like using their phones, but as revision it is a pretty poor way of going about things if you want to really test the depth of their understanding. I also hadn’t made one for them (because they require quite a bit of effort to set up and, as I said, aren’t actually worth it as a revision tool) so it was a no-go. Unable to give them exactly what they wanted, instead, I asked them why they all thought a Kahoot would be the best approach.

Quizzes are good, I was told, as they add competitiveness and make revision fun.

Good, I said in reply, we can do a competitive quiz - just not one on Kahoot. I could improvise a team quiz for them, splitting the class in two.

But on Kahoot, they told me, everyone can play on their phones. A normal classroom quiz meant only the person who raises their hands get to answer.

Not true, I reminded them. You can all answer in your heads regardless of whether or not you get picked to answer a question for your team. And besides, not everyone has a phone so not everyone can actually access a Kahoot, whereas everyone could answer quiz questions. Also, I pointed out, by not limiting their answers to multiple choice we can have a far more competitive quiz that would actually check the depth and detail of their understanding. I also made the argument that if retrieval practice was so vital when revising for exams based on retrieval (a vicious circle of nonsense that we’ll deal with another time) then Kahoot was not fit for purpose as, by giving them multiple choices, they aren’t retrieving anything - they’re being prompted.

But Kahoot is fun, they said, because it gives so many ridiculous points for every question.

I asked a question about the Christian sacrament of Eucharist (part of the topic we have finished in RE) to one half of the room and gave the student who answered 25, 000 points for doing so. I asked the other half of the room to recite a line of the Lord’s Prayer and when, eventually, one was recited, I gave them 18,500 points. See - I could give randomly inflated arbitrary points too!

And so we had a revision quiz. One involving short answers, long answers, mime, quotations, examples, and a completely random scoring system. The students enjoyed it and we highlighted areas of knowledge they were struggling with as well as areas in which they flourished. We revised and we had fun, and it was the lesson they chose to have. Meanwhile my next Year 10 class had no interest in Kahoots and quizzes at all. They wanted serious help with their 12 mark essays and their understanding of sacraments. So we wrote an essay together as a class - me typing their words onto the board and guiding some of their thinking as they offered all the planning, structure and ideas. I got to model good technique but did so from their own prompts and suggestions.

By running each of those three lessons in a completely improvised way (not unplanned - improvised. The difference being, like a good episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, I still knew where we needed to go and what we wanted to achieve and that the aim of the lesson was to get there) instead of dictating a particular method for getting to the desired endpoint to my students, I allowed them to take the lead and we got there together, cooperatively rather than hierarchically. Likewise, instead of prepping them for their upcoming test by scaring them about its importance and their need to succeed, I told them that my aim for the test wasn’t for them all to get perfect scores and get everything right, but to do their absolute best and use the test to see what they don’t know. That I would rather they got a “righteous fail” and learnt from it for next time than cheat to pass (always a possibility when they work online and unsupervised for an assessment).

While I enjoyed my lessons with Year 7 and Year 12 as well today, teaching each class interesting new content, it was those three improvised lessons that really made the day worthwhile and reminded me of the everyday creative possibilities in the classroom we are often too afraid - or jaded, or overworked - to grasp onto.

These are the things it will be important to remember when the term gears up and begins to grind.