I found myself running a short lesson on the next session our Peer Mentors were running with our Y9 students. I was rushing to the lesson from my last class and picking up some resources and heading straight to class. The Y12 and Y13 students were in class already. I jumped into teaching. “Okay team, here is what we are doing tomorrow….” I launched into a teacher led, lecture style description of what they would be doing in class. I assumed this would be okay as I was talking to peer mentors who are usually capable Y12 and Y13 students, and would be able to handle being ‘taught’ (in the most old school sense of the word).
I was reminded that this is my default style from a fellow associate dean. She asked me how the lesson went. I said fine: “I just explained to them what they were going to be doing tomorrow.” The other dean said that she had got her students to discuss how each part of the ‘lesson’ they would be running with Y9 students and how the Y9s might feel, how they could run it, and what approaches they had to introducing the content. A much more student centred approach than my own.
I was speaking to another associate dean about my absolute disregard for any student centred pedagogy during my peer mentioning session and he said he ran the lesson as if the mentors were Y9s and then asked them to reflect on the session, in essence helping them to understand and see any pain points, how they felt, and how they might deliver it differently. Which goes to show, there are many ways to deliver a lesson with some student engagement in the process. It was a vital reminder for me, that there is still much to learn (and put into practice!)
My default style
My default teaching style is deliver some new content to students, and then to get the students to practice this new content. Often this looks like Hei Mahi, usually a revision of the previous days learning, while I do the class roll. I justify this by knowing that students need repetitive practice at skills to fully learn them, but it’s also a pragmatic way to do the class roll and to have any discussions with students.1 Then I would typically get up and answer the Hei Mahi questions. I’d then explain the work for the day, usually in a smallish chunk and get the rest of the class ready to work on some problems on their own. With my senior tauira, I might extend the ‘front loading’ a little but I still prefer students to practice over me talking for 40 minutes. I then let the students work on problems in small groups and walk around and help individuals and groups.
The good
- I have a default style and it’s consistent. This helps tauira understand what is going on in the classroom at any given time. This helps with routiens and gives students a sense of safety in the classroom. Very useful for my Y10 students in particular who only see me twice a week.
- It’s special when I do something different, and students appreciate it more. This might also be seen as a negative if most of the time I am not using interesting pedagogy.
- It seems to work fairly well. My Y9 students, in particular, have given me great feedback during parent teacher interviews about my explanations, and that they now love maths where they didn’t use to enjoy it.
The not so good
- Lack of student agency in the classroom. By default it’s either me at the board, or students working in groups, but never students in front of the whole class and there is very little whole class discussion.
- Ability for students to opt out of learning because they aren’t given the option to participate fully.2 For example, some students might just sit quietly and listen to their myself or their peers, and if they don’t get any work done in their books they haven’t really achieved anything during the lesson. In the above example, I didn’t have any individual or group work for the students to do, so there was no possible participation in the lesson.
- Could be boring for some students. Doing the same thing everyday might not be the most stimulating classroom environment for tauira who enjoy variation in the classroom. It could also be one dimensional just listening to me teach.
Next Steps
This is not the only time I’ve thought about what I’m like as a teacher. My colleague Mr C suggested that we tend to teach how we’ve been taught when we are going from instinct or don’t have a set plan for the lesson. He suggested that when we want to do something different in the classroom we must plan, and make a concious effort to change what we do by default.
On the other hand, because I’m an associate dean this year, I have less time for planning and I am relying on my default more often. So first is to make sure if I want to change that I need to plan for the change, but make it something that is easy to embed into my default style, in essence to help me change my default, which means I’ve hopefully also improved by default teaching style if it becomes second (or even first) nature.
The types of things I need to implement are actually something that Maria has highlighted, and I’ve written a separate post on the feedback from her on my teaching.
Footnotes
[1] These discussions range from students asking what the date is, whether they can have a pen or book, why they are late or a myriad of other small requests that make up teaching
[2] Or students could be forced to participate. Some of my colleagues have a random system for asking students questions, but this needs to be mediated by allowing students to not know the answer, giving the question and then giving students time to formulate a response, and having a very supportive classroom environment.
