Christine Gilbert's pronouncement that classroom behaviour is getting worse because of boring lessons will cause irate buzzing on teachers' noticeboards: "If I'd wanted to be a performing monkey I would have joined the circus," they will say. Some teachers will feel this is an attack on professional standards. But Gilbert is right to make this link.
In schools that serve poorer areas, where many students' attention spans are decimated by a diet of sugary snacks, video games and 20 channels of fast-edited crud on the cathode ray tube, pupil engagement is not just an issue; it is the issue. The teacher who is not able to induce open mouths expressing awe and wonder within the first 10 minutes of a lesson is likely to witness the jaws of those mouths slacken as one, when class behaviour heads quickly in the direction of "off-task".
Teachers are under irrefutable pressure to entertain. Losing a difficult class in the first 10 minutes of a double lesson on Friday afternoon can present the poor teacher with a two-hour inferno, leading to self-doubt and misery.
Consequently, many teachers have developed a style of classroom management using a variety of stimuli, recognising that children learn best when they talk to one another in groups, and making use of culture and the arts as a key part of their methodology.
Their methods are satirised by some sections of the education community as "edutainment". This is merely the boring teacher's shorthand for good practice.
In general, kids mess about when they are bored.
Gilbert is merely drawing teachers' attention to the simplest answer to the difficult class: don't bore 'em.
Most teachers understand this without having to be told. My own experience has been predominantly in the inner city, and avoiding student boredom in these environments is a pre-requisite for a teacher's survival. It may be that in schools where children don't dismantle the furniture if a teacher talks at them for two hours there is less pressure to entertain, and didactic styles of instruction are more prevalent.
But planning exciting lessons is a time-consuming activity. Vast swathes of a teacher's time in an over-regulated education system is spent proving they are doing the job, rather than actually doing it. If Gilbert wants more exciting lessons, perhaps the focus should be less on top-down diktats, and more on reducing teacher workload, so that we have the time to engage, to excite and, yes, even to entertain.
n Phil Beadle is an English teacher at Oasis Academy, Coulsdon, and a columnist for Education Guardian-guardian.co.uk
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