My year 11 class have four lessons left before their first exam. Despite the fact I’ve been telling them for weeks that their exam is going to come around sooner than they thought, this still came as a shock to them when I told them last lesson.
I could see the panic set in. With five minutes left of the lesson, they were all frantically asking me questions.
One after the other, their arms were flung up in the air with anguished faces as if they hadn’t had two years to learn all of this stuff. This continued until one particularly loud girl just shouted over them all: “Miss, can’t you just teach us the whole of year 10 again?!”
Part of me felt relieved that it wasn’t my teaching that had failed them. They had another teacher last year (who has since left the school), who (so they tell me) was not known for being the most inspiring teacher. However, I did remind the girls that “just because they allowed you to sit and do nothing/just copy from the book/chat and use your phones during lessons, didn’t mean you had to do that”.
Getting 15 and 16-year-olds to take responsibility for their own learning (and their own mistakes) has turned out to be a really difficult task. Despite recognising that they had a tendency to be lazy and silly last year, they were determined to blame their teacher.
Since taking on the class, I have come to understand how frustrating it can be when very capable students are failing themselves. It’s not that they are badly behaved, in fact they are a lovely class who I thoroughly enjoy teaching. However, some (a minority) are not going to achieve their target grades because they are lazy. This is a higher tier class with some incredibly bright and hard-working students – but there are five or six who will struggle to scrape a C.
Despite all of the feedback, the personalised targets, the revision lessons tailored to them or the specific intervention plans, they are still not reaching that C with just two weeks to go before their exams.
I was beginning to have a bit of a crisis of confidence. I couldn’t understand why there were these students in my class who were just not going to achieve their targets even though I’d done everything my training (and my department) had told me to do.
Why is everyone else in my class achieving their target grade or exceeding it, but these students are falling so short?
I went to my head of department to ask what I should be doing to try and get them on track. As well as simply wanting them to do well, I was very aware that ultimately both the department and I would be judged on these students’ results. However, my head of department made me realise that there is often nothing you can do if the students do not want to help themselves.
The reality is that those students who were offered intervention and actually attended and made the most of it have dramatically increased their marks in the recent assessments, while those that didn’t bother have not improved.
Those who came at lunchtime when I offered to go through their test papers went from a D to a C while those who didn’t bother stayed where they were.
My head of department reassured me that it doesn’t matter how much you do, if they don’t want to achieve their target, they probably won’t. This lesson has been a particularly frustrating one to learn.
- SecEd’s NQT diarist this year is a teacher of citizenship, RE and humanities at a school in England.