Thinking through teaching High School students about Jesus, History and English

Who's happier, students or teachers?

Well it’s been a long time since my last post. Caught up in the hurley-burley of term 4 I haven’t really had much time for reflection. However, it’s the last day of the year for students today (with one to go tomorrow for staff) so I thought I would reflect on why we get so excited at the end of the year.

I remember that when I was at school, by recess on the first day of term, I was looking forward to the next holiday. Unfortunately, as a teacher, I am not that different. I love having time to rest! But, I love my job. I get a kick out of helping kids learn and developing into a mentor style relationship etc. So why do I look forward to the holidays so much?

1. I’m tired. By this stage of the year, I’m physically, emotionally, creatively and intellectually drained. Teaching is a job that is very taxing and by the end of the year, there’s not much left in the tank.
2. Students are tired. Students get the same way I do, only, their tiredness manifests itself in crazy behaviour. This falls to the teachers to try to deal with. Students need a break, teachers need a break from students.
3. Reading and Reflection. As an English and History teacher, there’s a fair bit of reading I need to do to keep up to date with my subject and for my enjoyment. The holidays offer a great opportunity to catch up on reading when you actually have time to reflect on it and digest it.
4. Catching up with Family. As many teachers would know, during term, when you are tired, it can be hard to make quality time with family and friends. The holidays are a great time to catch up on this.

I love teaching, but I also love the holidays. These are just some of the reasons I look forward to time away from teaching.

What do you look forward to in the holidays?

Some flexible students from Ireland

There is a great deal of talk in the media and discussions in Educational circles about the need to prepare students to be flexible in a world that does not yet exist. However, I wonder if we’re just not giving our students enough credit.

Society’s constant answer for so called societal ‘problems’ is education. Whether it’s driver education, sex education, drugs, health, computers… anything! The answer is always to give it to teachers. The latest is this preparation for the unknown.

Except, isn’t that what teachers have always been doing? Has anyone ever been able to predict what the world will be like in five or ten years time?

History has consistently proved that people are able to adapt.

George Washington, Arthur Philip, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton and Mark Zuckerberg did not go to these schools, yet somehow managed to survive. Our students will too.

Maybe we’re just feeling like ‘helicopter parents’. Students succeed in spite of, as well as because of their teachers.

What do you think?

I read an interesting article in the SMH online today. It discussed the dangers that pornography poses in the development of young men and women and healthy attitudes to relationships–particularly sexual ones.

The article had attracted over 200 comments the last time I checked and has clearly ignited a great deal of debate.

As a Christian and as a husband, many of the things the article was talking about were ringing true. It certainly reminded me of the danger of pornography. Furthermore, it reiterated how important my role is in educating young people.

I know that pornography is a distortion and corruption of God’s design for sex. It is so important for me, as a Christian male teacher, to help the young men in my care to not see women through the tainted lens of pornography, as well as helping them to see the long-term negative effects that it can have.

It’s worth checking out if you have a few minutes.

For my Year 10 class’s recent decade study: the 1950s, I decided to opt for something other than a series of textbook exercises or source-based worksheets and class discussions.

Instead, I opted to use a project-based, collaborative approach and asked students, in groups, to create a documentary about the decade.

The task was set up with students given a list of what their documentaries should include: pretty much the dot-points from the syllabus, so they would be able to do their School Certificate exam. I also gave them a proforma for reflection as their documentary developed.

We were able to book computer labs and the use of a couple of video cameras for about three weeks’ worth of classes.

The task had mixed success. As you would expect, some groups got really into it and produced some strong work. However, other groups’ efforts were not as strong. In particular, some students did not want to apply themselves, as the task was not for their assessment mark. In some cases, dominant personalities in the group were able to boss others into doing most of the work–all part of learning to operate as part of a group I guess.

Furthermore, the reflective component of the task was not carried out very effectively. This was mostly my fault, as the task was finished in the busy last week of term, before students went on holidays and came back to exams.

To improve the task for next time, I think I need to do a couple of the following:

• Don’t have it at the end of term, so students don’t see it as a ‘run out the clock’ kind of activity
• Perhaps assign the groups, or roles within the groups
• Provide more concrete steps, that groups can complete. However, I deliberately left the task fairly open, so the students could surprise me with their ingenuity and they mostly managed to produce good work
• Have compulsory progress checks/reflection hand-in times
• Emphasise to the students more that it is a real task, that they can learn from.

Click this link to see an example of one of them.

Have you made documentaries with your classes? Any tips?

This is the question that I have asked two of my classes over the last couple of days. It is not intended as a gentle reminder of how they should be behaving, but asks them to actually think critically and academically about how a Christian (not necessarily themselves) could respond in a given situation.

This approach was used as a result of reading chapter 22: ‘Curriculum Design’ in Teaching Redemptively by D. L. Graham (2009). The chapter argues that at a Christian school, the approach to scripture should be integrated authentically through all subjects. The point is, that it helps students to see that all things are under the lordship of Christ. Furthermore, this approach allows students who are not Christians to engage in an equally critical way, not being academically penalised for a lack of faith.

In my Year 9 History class, I asked my students how they thought a Christian would have responded to the Treaty of Versailles at the end of WWI. This was done from both sides: The Allies and the Germans. In both cases, students maturely discussed biblical concepts of helping those who are weaker than yourself, loving your enemy, submitting to authority and turning the other cheek. It was great to be a part of.

With my Year 8 English class, I asked them to imagine that one of the animals or farmers in Animal Farm by George Orwell was a Christian. I asked them to consider how that character would respond if they were a Christian. Students wrote down their ideas, later discussing these as a class. While this did not go quite as well as with my Year 9s, there were still some good ideas, and students starting to think critically about both the Bible, and Animal Farm. I was pleased this was the case and look forward to developing it further.

Have you had any similar experiences?

Prezi is a presentation software that I’ve been trying to use in class. Two applications I’ve tried so far are:

1. As a teacher presentation
2. For students to make their own presentation

Some positives:

• It is fun
• More visually appealing and interesting than a standard PowerPoint presentation
• It helps visual learners to organise their ideas in a visual way

Some Negatives:

• It can be a bit fiddly
• Requires a good flash player and may not work on school computers
• Can be time consuming (for both teacher and student alike)–This is hard if you want to get the presentation looking just right

Overall, I would recommend giving it a go (we get a free education license) or at least checking out the link at the top.

Here is an example of one that I put together today to help my Year 10 History class revise the topic of Gough Whitlam.

I’ve heard many teachers, myself included, declare that they love teaching, but hate marking. For many in our profession, it seems as though marking is the bane of our existence. There seem to be a number of reasons for this:

• Time: This is the biggest. Marking takes time, and teachers with full teaching loads, who attract the most marking, have very little time to sit at their desk. If they do manage to find some, it is very easy to be distracted by other things happening in the staffroom.
• Boredom: Marking the same thing, said in the same way, a hundred times gets very repetitive.
• The Home Factor: This relates particularly to time, mentioned above. It is rare to meet a teacher who does not have to take marking home on a reasonably regular basis. This common practice blurs the boundary many of us hope to achieve between work and home, making it hard for teachers to switch off.
• Our Teaching: Unfortunately, when there is lots of marking to be done, anecdotal evidence suggests that teachers neglect their lesson planning, lacking the creative energy to develop effective pedagogy. We are stuck just doing some text book questions or watching a video.

I’m sure the list of these gripes could continue. However, I will stop there.

A plethora of research clearly shows the importance of giving students feedback and the importance of both summative and formative assessment. I have also had the thrill of realising through marking that students have been listening to me in class. I try to use peer-marking whenever possible, but still find I spend a fair amount of time marking assessments, let alone giving students detailed feedback for class tasks along the way.

Whether we like it or not, marking is something we are stuck with and an important part of our job. However, I also feel that perhaps marking should be factored in to a teacher’s load. Giving a teacher more marking and preparation time during the work-day (even if it means extended hours) will help us to manage this important task.

Moreover, it will help us to plan our lessons more effectively, keep up to date with academic reading and help us to learn new technologies.

What do you think?

Have you got any marking tricks that help you stay effective and save time?

I recently came across this outstanding resource for teaching American History. There are a great array of primary sources available on a wide range of easy to navigate topics: Jim Crow to Civil Rights to Civil War to WWII etc.

Well worth a look if you teach American History and are struggling to locate some primary source material for your students.

Primary sources are critical when teaching students to engage with history–helping them to do the real work of a historian and interpret their own conclusions from the evidence available.

I recently read another blog about the idea of the paperless classroom: Increasing Student Engagement by Getting Rid of Textbooks.

It has some thought-provoking ideas, that I largely agree with. They certainly seem to match most of the things we learnt at Uni.

However, one of the things I’ve been struggling with in some of my classes, is that students feel like they are “learning” when they use the textbook and that somehow it is more valuable than say a web-quest, or even a worksheet prepared by me.

I wouldn’t call myself a technophobe, but at the same time, I see great value in books and paper resources and think we should be careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water as it were.

What do you think?

I’m not sure whether I can full answer this question, but here is some food for thought if you’ve got 20 minutes to check out this clip.

Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity?