How Stories in the Classroom Can Lead to Meaningful Learning

Extract from The Exam Class Toolkit: How to Create Engaging Lesson That Ensure Progression and Results (Continuum). This section is a snapshot on using stories in the classroom.

The following story was emailed to us recently. At first it may seem just like a
funny story, but if you read between the lines, it raises several interesting
questions. Can you spot them?

An old Maori man lived alone at his family home out in Ruatoria.
He wanted to dig his kumara garden, but it was very hard work.
His only son, Hone, who used to help him, was in Paremoremo prison.
The man wrote a letter to his son and described his predicament.

Kia ora e Hone,
I am feeling pretty bad because it looks like I won’t be able to
plant my kumara garden this year.
I’m just getting too old to be digging up a garden plot.
If you were here, all my troubles would be over.
I know you would dig the plot for me.
Aroha nui
Papa

A few days later he received a letter from his son.

E Pa,
For God’s sake! Don’t dig up that garden, that’s where I buried the BODIES.
Love
Hone

At 4am the next morning, Gisborne C.I.B and the local police showed up with a search warrant and dug up the entire area without finding any
bodies. They apologized to the old man and left. That same day the man received another letter from his son.

E Pa,
Go ahead and plant the Kumara.
That’s the best I could do under the circumstances.
Love
Hone

Continue reading How Stories in the Classroom Can Lead to Meaningful Learning

5 Steps to Creative Ideas

Beginning tomorrow morning every single one of us is going to sell Ideas! …What we are not clear about is just how to get ideas. So I said maybe you could tell us. – James Web Young (2003)

So, how do I get ideas?

In James Webb Young’s brilliant book, A Technique for Producing Ideas, he argues that coming up with an idea is actually a rather straight-forward process. In fact, the reason why ideas differ so enormously is because it is simply a new combination of old elements and the way we view relationships between them. So, in Young’s view, some will see each piece of fact as a separate bit of knowledge whilst others will see a link in a chain of knowledge with relationships and similarities. For the latter, facts are more like an illustration of a general law applying to a whole series of facts. Therefore, for someone who is quick at spotting patterns and relationships several ideas will be produced. When relationships are seen they in turn lead to the extraction of a more general principle which, when understood, suggests the way to a new combination – the new idea. This process can of course be cultivated as Young states:

The production of ideas is as definite a process as the production of Fords; that the production of ideas, too, runs on an assembly line; that in this production the mind follows an operative technique which can be learned and controlled; and that its effective use is just as much a matter of practice in the technique as is the effective use of any tool

5 Steps to Creative Ideas (influences from Young)

Step 1. Gather Material

As with all professions without understanding the key facts you have nothing. If you sit and wait for a revolutionary idea to strike you, think again! Johannes has worked as mentor and Associate Tutor for many years and have helped new teachers who sometimes would start planning their lessons without having done any research into the topic. His advice was always to ensure that subject knowledge was sound before planning begins. Teaching a lesson without understanding the subject content is impossible. Lack of understanding leads to poor teaching (see Musings on Creativity in Teaching Part 1: Knowing Your Knowledge). That said, outstanding teachers not only have specific knowledge of their topic but also a general understanding of their subject which enable them to understand the ‘bigger picture’. We also suggest a third element, namely to have a wider perspective in other subject areas. Outstanding teachers gather anecdotes, information and stories from a range of areas for example architecture, music, business, nature and film etc.  The latter is essential in the creation of ideas. It is the new combination of specific knowledge about a topic coupled with a general understanding and wider perspective about the subject and other areas that will make ideas occur. The task of gathering material is a life-long one , be it an interesting quote, enigmatic photo or recent news story, find ways of cataloguing/storing these snippets of data.

Step 2. Oblique Strategies

This part is less concrete  as it involves thinking more abstractly about the facts you have, looking at each one individually, bringing two facts together to see if they fit, as well as beginning to synthesize and spot relationships. For this process to work you should try not to think too directly at each element but do what Young refers to as ‘listening’ for their meaning without ‘looking’ for it (Young 2003, p30). What tends to happen here is that you will get initial, sometimes rather odd, ideas but don’t disregard these as they will help to shape your future ideas. Whilst engaged in this process you’ll also feel like you’ve ran into a wall, but don’t give up just yet. It’s the same feeling you have when you’re engaging in a long brainstorming-session with a team and it feels like you’re getting nowhere – but you are! It is crucial to continue just a little bit longer before stopping, not giving up, but stopping as you have exhausted you mind for the time being. Cue: Step 3.

Step 3. No Efforts – Stop Thinking

This is the time for your unconscious mind to do some work. Like you say to your students, remember not too cram everything the night before… Well, the reason you say that is also because the mind needs to rest to synthesize the information properly – to take it all in. However, sleeping will not be the only solution to your ideas. The best way of letting your mind rest whilst topping up the creative juices is to undertake another creative, yet relaxing, activity for example go for a nice run or long walk, watch a decent film, listen to music and so on. You are not only giving your mind time to reflect but also providing additional material which has nothing to do with the topic at hand but will serve to keep your mind working without you having to think about it.

Step 4. It Just Came to Me

Just like that, the idea popped into your head when you least expected it, in the middle of the night, early in the morning or sometimes annoyingly when you’re driving or in a situation where frantically writing down things may not be regarded as something positive. So, when you stop pushing for ideas and gone through a period of rest, they’ll show up.

Step 5. The Bleak Reality

When you take out your new idea to the harsh reality you might realise that it’s not as wonderful as you once thought. This is the hardest part; moulding your idea into the structures and conditions so it can work. It is during this period when most people give up and put their idea in the half-baked drawer together with hundreds of its counterparts. Solution: don’t protect your new idea, throw it to the Devil Advocates! You will then see that your idea carry self-generating qualities as it stimulate those who examine it and consequently will help develop into the final masterpiece.

If you find the topic about ideas interesting you might want to get your hands on a copy of these books, they have stimulated us to write some of the posts on Eat.Sleep.Teach.

Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley

Making Ideas Happen – Scott Belsky

The Back of the Napkin – Dan Roam

The Art Of Innovation – Tom Kelley

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Not Invented Here: the Cloud as the Creative Playground for Educators

In Europe and Elsewhere, 1923, Mark Twain states that:

The slowness of one section of the world about  adopting the valuable ideas of another section of it is a curious thing and unaccountable. This form of stupidity is confined to no community, to no nation; it is universal. The fact is the human race is not only slow about borrowing valuable ideas it sometimes persists in not borrowing them at all. (p. 175)

Twain was referring to the fact that nations find it difficult to use something that has already been invented and used the example of USA’s insistence on keeping their large and old-fashioned stoves although Germany had already invented one that was far more efficient and less clunky. Twain pointed to the fact that as Americans hadn’t invented the new stove it couldn’t be any good.

Teachers, and other professionals, may also be guilty of this. You may not be in this category but do read on as you might find out a thing or two about your colleagues. On a serious note, as a teacher have you ever created a classroom resource that had already been produced by someone else? Again, how many times have you heard or yourself said that “we must share more as a profession?” or that “we must find a process and system where we can share resources online”? The reason many of us are more willing to recreate a piece of work is what D. Ariely refers to as the NIH bias – or ‘Not Invented Here’ – which means that if it hasn’t been made by us it can’t be good.

In an experiment Ariely’s team wanted to check how far NIH bias was true. A control group was given a list of problems and suggested solutions. They could either choose to go with the suggested solution or think of one on their own. Ariely’s team wanted participants to come up with a solution on their own but, at the same time, reach the exact same solution that Ariely’s team had come up with before. Here are two examples of ‘problems’ that participants had to solve (the solutions are the one’s come up with by the scientists):

1. What innovative change could be made to an alarm clock to make it more efficient?

Solution: If you hit snooze your coworkers are notified via email that you overslept

2. How can communities reduce the amount of water they use without imposing tough restrictions?

Solution: Water lawns using recycled gray water recovered from household drains

In order to ensure that participants reached the same solution they were given a list of 50 words which had to be used to solve the problem. Each list contained the words or synonyms of words that made up the solutions reached by the scientists. It was hoped that this would give the control groups the feeling of ownership whilst ensuring the solutions were virtually identical. Moreover, at the top of the list there was also the words that made up Ariely’s solution but jumbled up so participants would see those words first. At the end of the experiment all participants decided not to choose the suggested solutions but their own, which were virtually identical. Ariely concluded that as human beings we attach a sense of meaning to something we have created, even if it resembles the original idea (something I discussed in more detail in this post).

As with the American and German stoves, in many respects, we sometimes over-value our own creations. In education there is sometimes a tendency to overvalue the usefulness and the significance of one’s ideas, even if they originally were produced or thought of by someone else. This is because we attach a strong sense of meaning to the resources we produce. I once had a Head of Department  who always came prepared with answers to departmental discussions although they had asked the team to consider what they felt to be the most pressing issues. Whatever solutions my colleagues and I came up with the Head of Department would match them with those on their own PowerPoint presentation. Essentially this meant crowbarring our ideas into a pre-existing slideshow, leaving us feeling demoralised and that our ideas were insignificant. By hampering creativity in this manner the department did not progress in the same way if discussion had been open.

Instead of spending time re-creating existing ideas many schools are instead taking them onboard to save on resources and have therefore time to focus on developing new and exciting ideas. There are Departments that are very effective in sharing good practice with it’s staff and some schools have started ‘best-practice hubs’ where outstanding teaching is discussed and shared. These institutions often do well and have a tendency to produce teachers that later go onto become Advanced Skills Teachers and inspiring leaders. The key to this success lay in changing the culture of both sharing, which can be difficult, but also in taking risks to become more creative and innovative.

If the ‘Not Invented Here’ dilemma hampers continued development and/or the time allowed for teachers to innovate then there are solutions which can help. Cue: creativity in ‘the cloud’…

The Cloud as the Innovation Playground for Educators

Social creativity is not free-for-all; it is highly structured… Social creativity collapses without effective self-governance… [We-Think works] when we create something no individual could produce and where critical thinking is critical to developing ideas…  We Think (p.86) – C. Leadbeater

Leadbeater is referring to a concept where businesses (and other institutions) focus on mass collaboration rather than mass production, where people work together to solve complex problems instead of working solely on their own. Education would also benefit from this way of thinking, a move away from NIH bias – the Cloud provides scope for this to happen.

The Cloud has become what Michael Schrage calls the ‘prototyping playground’. You can beta test everything. For educators working with Cloud based systems such as Google Docs, WEB 2.0, LimeSurvey and online storage, these provide the opportunity to trial ideas, share thoughts on pedagogy and classroom practice. We decided to beta test our third book in 2008 where we shared our thoughts on teaching exam classes and initially wrote most of the content online where we could quickly experiment with ideas and structures. We then received feedback as comments, emails and on social media like Twitter. Based on people’s suggestions we redrafted large sections of the book and after receiving permission also included several long passages which people had contributed as ‘case studies’. You can still find remnants of the book here. In this respect the Cloud represents the world’s biggest testing ground, a ‘sandbox’. This means that thinking creatively in teaching is increasingly something you can do in public online and in collaboration with hundreds of others. The outcome has the potential of becoming more powerful, as Leadbeater suggests, than if the same work was undertaken in the department or team meeting.

While Yahoo was optimizing their home page in 2001, the guys at Google were inventing something totally new.

Seth Godin

It is worthwhile establishing a culture of collaboration online. It takes time as most people are more comfortable working around a table, in the office or classrooom. The power of online collaboration is that it takes the roof off your office or school building and leaves you, in a sense, vulnerable to others’ opinions but also provides you with thousands of colleagues instead of, say, just six. One example I find very interesting is crowd-sourcing information for a specific purpose. This when you open a problem or query to anyone or, what happens more often, to everyone in a core area like education. The power of crowds and collaborating is investigated carefully in James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, who explains that under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent and are often smarter than the smartest people in them. One successful example of this was done using the Twitter hashtag #movemeon to crowdsource ideas about good teaching and learning and later put these together in PDF format as well as online using On-Demand Publishing to sell the file as a book without having to incur the cost of publication. Hundreds of people participated in this project and many have since used this idea for other similar projects. If this had been done by say three-four people the results would never have been the same. As this project was limited to 140 characters the depth of conversation was not the focus but the brainstorming of ideas.

An even more powerful way of using the Cloud to work creatively to solve mutual problems was achieved by Ory Okolloh in 2008. During the post-election violence that erupted in Kenya and the ensuing media black-out, she posted updates and collated comments about the atrocities on her blog but found it difficult to keep up with the hundreds of comments and emails sent to her so she pleaded to the virtual world for a solution to automate the process. The solution came in a couple of programmers who in 72 hours set up an Open-Source software they named Ushahidi, or ‘testimony’ in Swahili. This piece of technology aggregated information from 1000s of emails and SMS messages and placed them on a map for people to see where violence was happening. Ushahidi is now used to report on for example:

  • post-earthquake crisis response and recovery efforts in Chile.
  • track near real-time stockouts of medical supplies at pharmacies (in a medical store or health facility) in Kenya, Uganda, Malawi and Zambia.
  • monitoring platform for the 2009 Indian general elections.
  • map xenophobic attacks perpetrated against non-South Africans.

The power of Ushahidi came when people started to collaborate and this way of crowdsourcing proved to be very successful. We are posting about ideas for using Ushahidi in education at a later date.

The Not Invented Here Bias may still run deep in many of us but there are tools available to help us overcome the issue. If Mark Twain was able to take a quick peek almost 90 years after his statement, perhaps he would grant us a smile at how some people are accessing tools online to not only use each others ideas but to collaborate on mass to increase their value and depth.

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Choosing Your Students

Each year a full-time teacher receives in the region of 250-300 students who they will deliver quality learning and teaching. As teaching professionals we don’t get to choose our students, of course not, our middle leaders and the Assistant Head in charge of time-tabling will organise what classes we teach. But, can we in fact have a say in what sort of students we eventually get to mould into independent thinkers?

I came across a brief post by Seth Godin who exclaimed that businesses and companies choose their customers:

Yes, you get to choose them, not the other way around. You choose them with your pricing, your content, your promotion, your outreach and your product line…

In many respects Seth Godin’s quote echoes many truths about education and how teachers must think carefully about what students they would like in their classrooms. If we breakdown Godin’s quote and rewrite it to fit schools it could sound something like this:

Choosing your students:

Yes, you get to choose them, not the other way around. You choose them with your lesson planning, your creative skills to engage, your offer of challenge and progress, your subject and professional expertise and your respect for them…

Let’s look at each element briefly.

1. Planning:

Purposeful planning and careful lesson design will help making students want to learn and see that skills progression matters both to life as a student but also beyond the classroom. Planning takes time, particularly if you’re recently new to teaching, but this time is worth every minute. Good planning leads to good learning but this is not to say it is easy to achieve as structuring an outstanding lesson is difficult. We have written extensively about lesson planning and design in our books and in recent posts which are also worth taking a look at: Planning GCSE with a Smile, Creativity in Teaching: start designing lessons and Educational Mashups part three: creative ideas from the ‘Industry’.

2. Creativity and Engagement

Thinking carefully about the outcome(s) of the lesson is crucial so that students learn and their skills develop. Creative and engaging lesson activities will help you and them to meet those outcomes. For example, how can you make a difficult concept easier to understand or in what ways can you help them find a topic more enjoyable? As teachers we know very well that if we plan good lessons with engaging and creative ideas students are more likely to enjoy it which means they stand a greater chance of learning and not behaving in such a way that would be detrimental to their and others’ learning. We have devoted a lot of time to developing creative and engaging lesson activities which will help you to plan effective lessons that are packed with learning, take a look at these posts: Educational Mashups Part four: creativity boosts from the wiseSimplicity at its best and Handheld Learning beyond the Classroom.

3. Challenge and Progress

I once heard a student talk about their options and they were to select them depending on how ‘easy’ they were. I later taught this student and in one conversation she explained that the easy subjects had become boring and that those that made her think were more enjoyable. Even if a student asks to watch a film it is unlikely they will enjoy that as much as having to work hard at solving a problem, collaborating on a project or receiving positive feedback on a piece of writing. This is why it is important to produce activities that not only challenge them to think but also moves their thinking forward. Purposeful feedback will help here. Take a look at these posts for further ideas about challenging students and motivating them through good feedback: Shred Their Work: or Reflections on Student Motivation and Using ‘The Ten Faces of Innovation ‘ in the classroom.

4. Subject and Professional Expertise

Terry Haydn, Senior Reader at the University of East Anglia and our old mentor (well, he’s not really old just very experienced!), always said that sound subject knowledge contributes to sound lesson content and that the power of good exposition should not be forgotten. Indeed, good story telling can enliven topics and give structure and a road-map to the ‘bigger picture’ that the class to follow. We also strongly believe that a broad understanding of our profession is key to becoming an excellent teacher and that this should never end. However, we urge you to read books that may not directly link with our profession, so not books about teaching but to cross-pollinate ideas from other fields like marketing, design, music, art and business. In return for reading, listening, watching and discussing with people from other industries other than education you will be rewarded with a myriad of stimulating and creative ideas. We have written a series of posts on cross-pollination called Educational Mashups which could be used as a starting point: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 .

5. Respect

In my work as Advisor I often get the opportunity to talk to OFSTED inspectors or receive training on lesson observations. One thing that always crop up both during lesson debriefs and in whole school feedback is the relationships between students and their teachers. Those teachers that have strong relations with their classes rarely have many behavioural problems compared to those who do not. However, this type of relationship does not happen quickly and involves more than jokes and understanding students backgrounds. Strong relationships between the teacher and their class happen when there is a clear and continued dialogue as well as exchange of thoughts. This is where good feedback, Assessment for Learning, Student Voice and just plain politeness are needed in order for this dialogue and exchange to occur. This post deals with how relationships can be solidified via purposeful feedback and enhanced student involvement:  Shred Their Work: or Reflections on Student Motivation.

The correct ingredients in making the perfect class is of course variable and the list provided above is by no means exhaustive, but will hopefully give some insight into what we as teachers try to do. In this respect, perhaps Seth Godin’s advice works in education as in business – we do get a say in choosing what sort of customers/students we get to work with or teach…eventually?

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Shred Their Work: or Reflections on Student Motivation

Don’t care Sir : or the importance of feedback

Spend a few seconds pondering about this thought experiment:

You work as a resource creator in a school. This means that you create exciting new PowerPoint presentations every week that include challenging tasks, inspiring images for discussion and so on. You are very proud of your slides. At the end of the week you hand over your beautifully crafted presentations to your Line Manager who deletes them without even looking. This happens weekly but you get paid a handsome salary. How do you feel about this?

Let’s turn this story on its head and pose this scenario instead:

You are a student in a school. This means that you will create, produce and complete a series of tasks and activities. At the end of the week you have handed in more than five pieces of work. You feel very proud each time a piece of work is handed in to your teacher. Next lesson your work is returned to you. It does not contain any comments or feedback about your masterpiece. This happens in most lessons and you are forced to do this weekly. How do you feel about this?

Providing feedback is an essential ingredient to ensure that students’ motivation is maintained otherwise there’s little point in working hard and trying to achieve. Their intrinsic motivation is heightened each time they receive critical and positive comments in their work, more so than if we try to convince them that it’s important they work hard otherwise they won’t get a good job. It is the immediacy that is the crucial factor in them progressing and becoming more motivated.

Providing good feedback:

1. Refrain from commenting on all work as it might become repetitive and meaningless

2. Acknowledge that you have seen their day-to-day classwork with a tick or stamp

3. Select milestone tasks e.g. an end of unit task that you mark and provide detailed feedback using the power of Assessment for Learning (we wrote a lot about effective assessment ideas in our last book). If you haven’t decided on these milestones as a department then we encourage you to do so first.

4. Hand back work as quickly as possible so that students link the homework/assessment with your feedback.

5. Allow students time re-draft work or parts of work based on the feedback you provided them – this is a concrete way to make them see their own progression.

For more ideas about engaging and purposeful assessment see this extract from our book Exam Class Toolkit

Shred it : or why praise really matters

In the brilliant book The Upside of Irrationality , Dan Ariely and his team investigate the relationship between motivation and a person’s meaning to their work. In this experiment they created a sheet of paper with a random sequence of letters on them and asked particpants to find instances where a letter ‘S’ was followed by another letter ‘S’. They were told that each sheet contained 10 instances of consecutive ‘S:s’. Participants were to find all ten instances of the S:s to complete a sheet. They would be paid: 55 cents for sheet 1 , 50 cent for sheet 2 and so forth until they got to the 12th page where they would receive nothing.

Three conditions were examined:

1. The Acknowledged condition:

In this control group participants were asked to write their names on each sheet prior to starting the task. When a sheet had been completed it was handed over to the researcher who would examine it carefully, nod and show their appreciation of the participants work before adding it on top of a pile of paper.

2. The Ignored condition

This group would complete the same task as the previous group but were not asked to write their name on top of each sheet. When they handed over a completed sheet the researcher took it without saying thank you and without looking at the sheet before adding it to a stack of paper.

3. The Shredded Condition

Unlike the the other two conditions, this group would hand over their sheets but instead of placing it on top of a pile of paper, the researcher placed it in a shredder without even glancing at it.

The results were rather interesting. As you can imagine, the ‘Acknowledged’ condition completed more sheets of paper than the ‘Shredded’ condition after payment had ceased. In fact, 49% of participants from the former condition completed 10 or more sheets compared to 17% from the ‘Shredded’ condition. Interestingly, the average number of sheets produced by the ‘Shredded’ condition was virtually identical to that of the ‘Ignored’ condition where 18% managed to produce 10 sheets or more after payment had ceased. So there was no major difference between the group whose work was destroyed and the group that was ignored.

In a school context this is a no-brainer: if you want to lower motivation amongst students then either bin their work or don’t bother to look at it. On the other hand, if you wish to motivate them, give them praise and acknowledge when they have produced something good. But if you think about it, it’s more complex than that. If you provide students with thoughtful praise and feedback rather than simply giving them a grade, they are more likely to work harder because of the effect of meaning on their work. It becomes clear to them that their effort was worth it. As teachers many of us crave recognition for our work either from colleagues, Senior Leaders or from our students. This is the reason why being a teacher is a bit like a roller-coaster ride, there are constant ups and downs depending on the amount of praise we receive. Being a student is more difficult, going from lesson to lesson up to five hours a day, working, listening and contributing in different ways. Acknowledging what they have to say and what they produce will ensure they don’t feel like we’re shredding their work.

IKEA School: or getting students involved

If you open a jar of pre-made of pesto and add that to pasta, how far would you feel pride over your creation? Not much we could assume. How about if you blend together some fresh basil leaves, olive oil, garlic, pine nuts, a dash of chili-powder and then add that over a bowl of fresh pasta? The feeling is probably rather different. You might even insist on finding out what other people around the dinner table think of your culinary skills? The difference between the two scenarios is simple: you were not involved in the former whereas you were in the latter. On a similar note, if you’ve ever constructed furniture from IKEA perhaps you would agree that you felt rather chuffed with yourself both after completing the piece of furniture and a long time afterwards (maybe each time you look at it?). This is the ‘IKEA effect’, if you get something for free you may not enjoy it as much as if you had been involved in its creation. So in this respect, effort creates long-term satisfaction and motivation. The question is of course, how much effort do students have to consume before they take pride in their work if the IKEA effect is to be true?

Johannes taught a top-set Year 9 about why some events are more significant than others throughout history. Their final piece of work involved creating a memorial of a person or event they regarded as ‘significant’ that they had studied over the past year. As part of the work they have to consider the following criteria:

  • convince fellow classmates why your event should be labelled ‘significant’
  • construct your memorial (model, text or more abstract e.g. ‘a day’)
  • present your creation to the class

The outcome of this project was interesting. Although this class by nature was hard-working and dedicated students in general, something changed during the span of this extended task. As part of the activity they had to construct their memorial by first producing a draft which their teachers reviewed, complete the memorial, write a script as well as prepare some form of presentation. Those segments of the task were straight forward and students were used to working in that way. The change came when they were informed that there would be an exhibition where they would present their work to passing visitors and that these ‘visitors’ would grade their work based on agreed historical criteria of ‘significance’. The impact on meaning of their work and therefore on motivation showed a marked difference from that moment on. They had, in many respects, built a piece of work from scratch and after much research on the subject. Now, faced with yet another challenge they were to meet their peers who would evaluate this construction. The pressure was on.

The final exhibition was a real success. Students spent the best part of a lesson to prepare and then exhibited their work the following day. Each student had a small area where they would display their piece, many used computers as they had created movies, 3D Models, presentations and so on. Visitors started walking around the various displays filling in their evaluation sheets, asking questions or generally commenting on the work on display. When the first group of visitors had finished, the class swapped so exhibitors became visitors. All students had also been given a sweet which they would give the memorial they felt signified the most significant event/person. At the end of the task we got the class together and talked about their experience. They commented that they:

– were very nervous about being critiqued by their peers
– needed longer to create their piece of significance next time
– felt proud over their own but also classmates’ efforts
– enjoyed thinking about everything they’ve studied
– had been challenged to think

From a teacher’s perspective learning happened on different levels. In terms of skills students moved up Bloom’s Taxonomy and tackled the difficult skills of both evaluation and synthesis when they used their understanding of the whole of year 9 history, planned and constructed their ‘memorials’ as well as critiqued others’ work. Students really worked hard at trying to convince each other that their memorial was the most accomplished one. But perhaps most importantly, students wanted to do well and they were motivated by the opportunity to show off their work to classmates. Although the challenge of public speaking could have added negative stimulus in terms of social pressure but because they talked to individual ‘or pairs of visitors’ this never occurred.

When the class took an end of year survey several weeks later about their views on the subject as a whole the vast majority commented that the memorial task and others similar to it were the highlight of the year.

There are other ways where we can involve students more actively in their learning so that their effort creates long-term satisfaction and motivation – the IKEA effect – for example:

1. Students get involved in the production of resources

2. Involve the class in deciding on the layout of the VLE or Department website

3. Why not get students involved in teaching mini lessons? We wrote about getting students involved in teaching lessons in one of our books.

Using the power of Student Voice and consider how you can plan lessons with more active involvement from your class are important components in increasing motivation amongst students. We don’t have to go to the extent of shredding students’ work to demotivate them and decrease learning, ignoring to use purposeful praise and meaningful feedback will have the same effect.

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