After 40 years of teaching, I have retired from the classroom with many lovely memories, a few embarrassing regrets, and loads of acquired insight into what teaching is really about.
In short snippets, I am sharing some of these insights with you throughout the coming weeks. This is #10.
Students’ Choice – Is a Powerful Motivator
I once had a class of 5th graders who voiced their wish to read more “stories like that” once we had gone through a chapter about Henry VIII. It only took me a second to suggest we throw the textbook out. That’s how it all started.
I would find readings for them, starting from Stonehenge, through the stories of British History, continued in year 6, until we got to Queen Victoria almost a year later. That’s when they wanted something else.
When I first got the revelation that the students could choose the contents of our readings, I just asked them what they would like to learn about. No hands up, no suggestions. So, I gave them a list of themes I thought they would like. I asked them to mark their favourites, and we chose the ones that had got the most points in a democratic order. It was the year 1996!
To organise the materials, I started collecting weblinks into Moodle. As the technology evolved, it gradually became possible to access my materials even online at school. These links later comprised the starting point of WebEnglish.
Then one day, there was an article in a daily newspaper about today’s teens having a low level of general knowledge. “I can fix that,” I thought. From then on, I gave the students the choice of various areas of general knowledge that they could choose from together with the “old” topics. (The list had shortened through the years.)
The biggest mistake I made was when I once thought I could save my planning time by combining two parallel classes’ choices into one syllabus. We would alternate the topics each class had chosen. That became a total disaster; The group that hadn’t chosen the topic showed no interest in studying it, while the other class was enthusiastic.
I also learned that there was no point in planning for the whole year all at once in the autumn. Students grow up and change their preferences very quickly, so we would often change our plans even in the middle of one term.
Any plan is only good until it’s changed.
Things happen, the world goes on, and new interests arise. I have learned to be very flexible and listen to students’ voices. It’s all about shifting the focus from teaching into learning, becoming a facilitator of students’ learning, as I wrote in my Blog #1.
After quite a few years, in a new school, a student stepped into my classroom on her own, just to tell me how she had hated English until I became her teacher. Now she loved it, and the reason she gave, was:
“When I got to decide a little myself, I could learn more because I was more interested.”
For the last 25 years, I kept developing the notion of Students’ Choice. The more responsive I grew, the more my students were able to choose – even individually – but that’s a topic for another blog.
WebEnglish Planning Page is based on students’ choosing what to study.
If you’d like to delve deeper into Student Voice and Choice, read what John Spencer has to say about it in
Teacher-Tested Ways to Build Student Ownership into Informational Reading