It takes a special kind of skill to make an
ICT (Information and Communication Technology) lesson boring in this day and
age, yet some teachers manage quite well. This article looks at how they do it
-- in the hope that it will help others avoid doing so!
The points which follow stem from my
experience of inspecting ICT in schools and also carrying out ICT reviews -- in
effect, an unofficial inspection, usually either in preparation for an
inspection or as part of the school's cycle of self-review.
There is no understanding of the purpose
of a starter activity
A starter activity is an activity with
which individuals start the lesson, not the class as a whole. The teacher who
waits until everyone is settled down before starting the starter activity has
somehow missed the point. She has also missed the opportunity to get the kids
engaged, ie working and interested, as soon as they enter the room. In every
class I've observed in which behaviour has been poor at the outset, the cause
has been the absence of a starter activity.
Pupils set the agenda
It's all very touchy-feely to talk about
pupil power and letting the kids decide, but apart from the fact that pupils
don't necessarily know what's best for them, they actually want to be
challenged and guided. Lessons in which pupils are dictating the pace tend to
be boring because the pace is always too slow.
The pupils don't know what's expected of
them
It's a truism, but if you don't know what
you're expected to achieve by the end of the lesson, you're not likely to
achieve it. After all, when was the last time you got to where you wanted to go
when you didn't know where you wanted to get to? It's a nonsense, obviously,
yet some teachers routinely fail either to "share the secret" with the pupils
or they tell the pupils what they, the teacher, intend to achieve. That's not
the same as the intended learning outcomes for the pupils. Why should they care
if you intend to cover absolute cell references or how to do a spell-check?
What matters is what they are expected to have learnt by the end of the lesson.
There is a lack of challenge
This
is, of course, closely related to the
last two points. If you're insufficiently challenged, you will be
bored.
Simple. Often this occurs when the teacher doesn't know what the pupils
already
know. Some of the most excruciatingly tedious lessons I've sat through
have
been about creating a web page or sending email -- when most of the kids
in the
class surf the internet all the time, have their own website, and spend
half of
their waking hours sending texts and emails or writing blogs (online
journals).
It's imperative to take some time to find out what the pupils already
know. (You may like to listen to the podcast on this subject:
http://www.terry-freedman.org.uk/podcast/hooks.mp3.)
The challenge is too great
This is much rarer than the previous point,
but it happens now and again. You need to always start with what a pupil knows
and build up from there. It's imperative to take some time to find out what
the pupils already know. (I'm sure I've said that before!)
The teacher spends too much time talking
Most people learn by doing. Even teachers
mostly learn by practising teaching, not reading about it or listening to
someone else talk about it. Yet I have observed lessons in which, out of a 55
minute lesson, the teacher spoke for 45 minutes. It gets worse. In those sorts
of lessons, the teacher loves his own voice so much that the 10 minutes the
pupils actually get to do something do not come in one chunk, but in two or
three blocks of a few minutes each. Typically, the teacher says, "OK, now I'd
like you to try that yourself. Remember, you select the text and then click on
the B to make it bold." This leads on to another characteristic of such
lessons…
The activities themselves are
intrinsically boring
They are low level, discrete, not obviously
related to anything either before or after.
Homework is tokenistic or non-existent
Homework is allowed to be non-existent when
it is to do whatever is necessary in order to be able to continue with the work
next time. Otherwise it should both consolidate and extend the pupils'
understanding of the topic in hand.
Plenaries are non-existent
In the worst lessons, the plenary follows
the POLO model: the teacher shouts above the din, "OK, print out [your work]
and log off.". There is no attempt to summarise what has been learnt, or to
place the lesson in a sequential context. Where the teacher does make an
attempt at a plenary, in the worst lessons it consists of a teacher telling the
pupils what they have covered, or what they have learnt, but not troubling to
actually ask them. At the end of one boring lesson I saw, the conversation went
like this:
Teacher to pupil: have you learnt how to
insert a page break?
Pupil: Yes.
Teacher: Excellent. So you have all learnt
how to insert a page break.
Erm, yes, ok…..
There is plenty of data, but no
information
I'm never impressed when a teacher shows me
a wad of statistical data. I'm more interested in whether the teacher and the
pupils know how the pupils are doing. This is something which goes beyond any
single lesson, of course, but it's virtually guaranteed that if you ask bored
kids in a lesson how they are doing in the subject, they don't know -- and
neither does the teacher!
In future articles in the premium section
of the website I will be exploring each of these points in further detail.
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