heart of heartlands lessons

On a Friday afternoon last week, I was trying my best to gee-up my year 10’s; I had them in groups, had them snapping their fingers and I had tried my hardest to make them really care about blood glucose levels and diabetes, by imagining they were a doctor diagnosing a patient, testing his urine and giving him advice. If Elen walks in now I thought, she’d love it. But the kids, they didn't really care. My usual go-tooers, the ones who always have your back no matter how tough it gets, couldn't even muster a vague look of excitement.

‘Sir’

‘Yes’

‘Can’t you just tell us the answers?”

They want to just know it. We need them to know it. So let's just spoon feed them, and only what they need.

As an approach to teaching and a curriculum design, this could be the ultimate in efficiency. Streamlined and no nonsense. Reading about curriculum design, of which you can do here, here and here, one thing clearly resonates with me. The importance of knowledge and which type we should choose. Substantive key facts, and disciplinary; how the knowledge is used and applicable to everyday workings. Some is also core and fundamental to aid in understanding, and some in hinterlands, supporting the understanding. With time constraints it is often too easy to only teach the core and substantive knowledge, but it is also important to weave a narrative into your teaching to present the information to students in a way that really gets them involved.

During the Wellington Conference I had the pleasure of attending a session by Hywel (rhymes with towel) Roberts. Being truthful, the man was so engaging he could have said anything and I would've believed it to be the next best thing in teaching; he really struck a chord with me. His approach was simple; give students a reason to care by making them part of the narrative you weave for them through the use of places, problems and names; making it warm. The knowledge is drawn through the storytelling process. Today we are not learning about diabetes, but today we are a doctor in the surgery and we need to make sure we know what's what if we are about to tell Stephen why he is peeing so much.

Now my introduction leads itself to the conclusion it doesn't work, but come Monday morning, when we started the lesson with a quick quiz, we saw the fruits of our labour. For all those struggling students wrestling with Monday morning blues and the questions of ‘Explain what diabetes is’ and ‘suggest treatments for diabetes’, it was really easy to say, “cast your mind back to when we were doctors in the surgery, how we explained to Stephen what was wrong and what to do”. The look of ‘got it sir’ is always a great moment in teaching.