Students as Teachers

Encouraging independent learning with exam classes is hard. There is not time, they may not do the work and there is not time…time… It does take a while for students to learn to work on their own and it requires a lot of practice in KS3 for it to work effectively. However, the biggest problem is not really time, but that that we do not trust students to do the work properly. If we set them a task which listens to what they have to say; encourage what they wish to achieve and provide them with enough space and time then the results will follow. The following activity took around six lessons and we only focused on ‘witchcraft’ as part of Crime and Punishment. Witchcraft is only 15 marks on the exam. We spent 6 hours + 3 hours homework. It worked.

Teacher:

What do you think of their choice of question?

Jordan:

Well, it’s ‘big’, you can infer things, you can analyse… it’s a very good question. There’s not like one simple answer, just like a knowledge

question ‘who did what, when…’, you can like expand on this one and take it further.

This is a brief outline of what we did with some of our Year 10 groups. We have used this exact approach with Year 9 – 13 and it works every time. They were given these criteria to follow:

• learning has to take place which would be identified during their Q&A
• session incl. plenary
• focus on engaging the class
• create and employ resources (incl. the use of the Interactive Whiteboard) in a functional and imaginative way.

Lesson 1:

Questions (30 minutes)

During the initial lesson I got two students to interview each other about a recent holiday:

Callum: Where did you go?

Beth: Italy.

Callum: How long did you go for?

Beth: One week.

Callum: Was it fun?

Beth: Yes.

We wanted them to gain awareness of the difficulty in building an enquiry which was both challenging but also gave students to the opportunity to analyze and evaluate historical issues. The class quickly realised the problems with the questions posed.

Groups were split into max 3-4. Students were asked to list the Main Topics in their books:

1. Life in the 1600s (incl. major events)
2. Origins of Witchcraft as a crime
3. Escalation
4. The End
5. Matthew Hopkins in east Anglia
6. Persecution of witches 1400-1600s

We then discussed Bloom’s Taxonomy (see attachment below) and how thinking evolves in different stages and how they can learn to progress on their own. Examples were given about how their thinking move from e.g. ‘knowledge’ , ‘comprehension’ to application and analysis. The main issues about the topic of witchcraft were handed out and students had to decide which topic they wanted to examine, rather than the teacher giving out topics. This way groups got to study what they really wanted. If there were duplicates of topics chosen then those groups had to discuss the possibility of changing to another topic.

Groups were given 10 minutes to think of a number of questions (approx. 3-5), using Bloom’s Taxonomy as guidance, one of which could become a potential Key Question. Discussion ensued about what type of questions they had written down and what characterize a challenging question. Groups commented on the suitability and limitations of some of the examples given. One student noted that “if you ask a ‘when’ question then it’s difficult to move away from simply listing ideas and that we should all be focusing on questions which get us to analyse“. Groups then went back to their original questions, modified these if necessary, and decided on one Key Question to use for their lesson. By the end of the lesson students had come up with some of these questions:

- Why did people in the Middle Ages believe in witchcraft?

- Matthew Hopkins terrified and destroyed East-Anglia. Discuss.

- How much has the perception of women changed since the 1600?

- Why did the crime of witch craft appear and then disappear?

The Structure of Lessons (30 minutes)

Students were given an explanation and shown concrete examples of the structure of a lesson including use of objectives, ‘hooks’, starters, main task(s) and plenary. The class was given clear guidance about each of the lesson components. We then discussed what they considered to be a good lesson, what made them interested, even inspired. Students came up with ideas about what they would like to see in an ideal lesson. Suitability of outcome(s) were then discussed and it was agreed that some tasks were better than others e.g. quizzes do not tend to challenge students and taking notes from PowerPoint Presentations does not encourage learning. Groups then started writing down ideas for what they wanted their co-students to learn in the lesson and how they were going to ensure this learning took place.

Lesson 2:

Groups researched their topics. We decided to use the school library for this lesson to give them a good environment to do their research. Groups were encouraged to set their own homework by dividing the research into smaller parts and assigned to the various team members.

Lesson 3:

This was the final lesson and included groups completing their lessons, creating resources, setting up and creating relevant Flip Charts for the Interactive Whiteboard (Active Studio). The class was now informed that during every mini-lesson, each group would be assigned to another one and had to write a critical appraisal of that group. This way, they not only had the opportunity to evaluate another group’s lesson, they were also reflecting on their own learning and execution of the lesson.

Lesson 4/5:

Groups taught their lessons. At the end of each lesson the class gave their new teacher immediate feedback commenting on what they had learnt, the way they had been taught and how engaged they had been.

Lesson 6:

We spent the final lesson discussing the outcomes of the project and what the students thought about delivering their own mini-lessons. Discussion was also raised about what they had learnt from this experience. Several commented that they had gained complete ownership of their work; that they had become specialists at their given topic and felt they could help others to gain a fuller understanding. Most importantly, many students made it clear that they felt respected and trusted by their peers as well as their teacher.

This approach made it clear that if learning is to be effective then making it relevant, keeping it interesting and providing a challenge are all essential components that need to be addressed. We have used this way of collaborating with students from different year groups and in various topics, and each time the students have had similar positive experiences. Handing over the board-pen to a class can be daunting at first but if planned carefully it can be a truly rewarding endeavour.

Giving students the trust, effort and time will ensure they know that they matter. Even better, they will use skills which we have repeated time and time again that are crucial to their learning:

• communication
• evaluation
• synthesis
• analysis

The only difference is that this time they have actually used them and they can see the results in their fellow classmates.