Fear and planning in Las Teesside: The first lessons

“There is nothing worse than spending two hours planning a lesson with great resources when the behaviour prevents you from delivering it.”

My biggest fear is of course behaviour management.  The fear is exacerbated by the fact I will only see each of my classes for 100 minutes every fortnight, and that is only if I don’t happen to have them on a Monday (bank holidays) or any day the school decides to fold down for PSHE or any other required activity.  As Spanish is new to my school as of this year, there are no GCSE classes, and there was no uptake for GCSE French in general this last couple of years.  Therefore I will only be taking KS3 this year in the hope to encourage at least one group to take Spanish next year at KS4.

The main reason for the fear is that I worry about the progress my students will make in general because language acquisition requires repetitive practise, and when there are classes that may have gaps of six weeks between them, I worry.   I am keen to inspire my groups and am concerned about the missed opportunities I already have to face, and so want to make the small amount of time that I do have with them matter.  I don’t want our lesson time wasted by low level disruption and behaviour issues.  Therefore in my preparation for September, I am going to try a little experiment…

The experiment was inspired by a four day ‘Restorative Justice’ course (see this blog by Creative Education) provided by my school at the end of the summer term.  Restorative justice is a concept generally focussed on developing empathy between individuals, and trying to lead others to see that we all have the same feelings and needs.

The term ‘Restorative Justice’ can also be known as ‘Restorative Pedagogy’ which is more relevant to my experiment as quickly defined, pedagogy means the method and practise of teaching.  Nowadays, we have been taught that we need to lead the student to the answer rather than stand at the front and lecture them on what it is or take the inductive approach (which I am big fan of) where through the designed activity, the student discovers any learning for themselves which is therefore more likely to be retained.

Therefore, when it comes to our expectations of the students that we share in the very first lesson with each class, I believe it is equally un-useful to stand and lecture the students on what is expected of them, and to get them to copy down the rules of the classroom that I provide.  The lack of ‘discovery learning’ makes me question how long it would stick, would I be faced with the disruptive, low-level misbehaviour eating into our precious teaching and learning time?

From speaking to other NQT colleagues, I know that many will arrive at the class rules with the students rather than dictate them, maybe even give the students an opportunity to share their expectations of the teacher.  I would like to add an extra step.  Before creating the rules, I will spend some time going through some of the feelings and needs that are prominent in the teacher/student relationship through a series of activities and discussions based on needs cards.  You can download the needs cards here and another great thing is, they are downloadable in several other languages, including Spanish for further language development work.

A rough guide to how I will use the cards would be to:

1. Ask the students to sort the selected cards into two lists, the words they know the meaning of and words they don’t, to open up dialogue and ensure understanding.
2. With the same cards, make two lists, one for student needs and one for teacher’s needs.  They can only use one card for one list; hopefully they will see the conflict that a teacher might share the same need i.e. for respect and therefore develop empathy for the teacher.
3. Give the students a scenario such as the class is being noisy; the teacher is waiting to be able to teach.  Which cards would you choose as the teacher, which cards would you choose as the student. IN the hope of developing said empathy, and a good way to find out about your students for subsequent lessons based on the needs they choose.
4. Activity: Pair the students, partner A goes outside.  You explain to partner B that when partner A comes back in, they just need to act like they are ignoring them.  Explain to partner A outside that they have to explain all of the details of the fun hey have had over the summer holidays  to their partner.  Get the students who have been ignored to explain how they felt.  As the students how they think the teacher might feel when they are being ignored.
5. Unrelated to empathy building, but nonetheless it is a Spanish lesson.  Spanish needs cards, students select the Spanish words they recognise (cognates) to build their confidence in Spanish, spotting patterns in the English and Spanish equivalents.

I expect this, plus the usual writing names on books to take up the first fifty minutes of the lesson, then will be followed by an introductory Spanish lesson.

The time spent at the beginning of the year, I hope will make up for any time that would have been potentially wasted over the course of the school year.

I would be really interested in hearing any feedback, or if you have tried this or something similar or would add a step or two, please let me know.  I would definitely be interested in hearing your point of view.

Part of my preparation for September has been to upload my better KS3 Spanish resources online so that I have them wherever I am.  They are also available for sharing so if you teach Spanish, have a look here.

Read here for an interesting behaviour seminar  that I went to at the beginning of the PGCE year that I felt really opened my eyes and that has more significance in the face of starting teaching next week.