“It’s really hard to engage a class like this. They don’t enjoy the subject and don’t want to be here.”

I am very blessed in that I get to go to a lot of schools, and I see hundreds of lessons a year. It’s a tremendous honour to work with other teachers like this, and I always learn a lot about my own practice. Of course, there are ways that I try to help, and there are certain things that I notice quite a lot. One of the things I notice quite often is that students are disengaged and not listening. I then discuss this with the people I am observing with, and work with them to learn how to spot the signs of disengagement and check whether students really aren’t listening or we are just using poor proxies to make lazy judgements.

When it is the case that we’re right, and students weren’t listening, we then discuss why that is. Often, someone will say something like the above, that it’s a difficult class or the like. And to an extent, that’s reasonable. Some students care more, some students care less. But that doesn’t mean we can end the story there, so I’ll reply along the lines of:

“Yes, I can definitely empathise with that. But the thing is, at no point during the lesson while we were in there did the teacher use any strategies that would actually raise the engagement in the room. They didn’t use things like Cold Call or mini-whiteboards, they let students call out answers and basically only picked students who had their hands up. When students didn’t know an answer, they didn’t investigate if that’s because they weren’t listening, and there were no accountability measures for when students weren’t paying attention. If all of those strategies were in play, and the students were still not listening, then maybe we would be in a different situation. But until that’s the case, we can’t just say that ‘they are hard to engage’…we have to do something first.”

In a recent A Level lesson I observed, the below happened:

During the lesson, the teacher was giving instructions about the next task. I noticed that a few students were still working on the last thing at the time, and I used the Hypothesis Model to predict that either students would not start the new task or would ask lots of procedural questions. This is exactly what happened.

In the feedback meeting, I pointed out that a student called Danny had needed the instructions repeated back to him. I asked the teacher why she thought that was, and she said:

“Danny finds it really difficult to focus and is constantly looking out the window or wandering his attention somewhere”

I said: “interesting, though I’m not sure I agree. Let’s look first at evidence, then at what I sometimes call ‘philosophy’ and then strategy. First thing – the evidence – is that it wasn’t just Danny. There were a couple of other students who also didn’t get started until the instructions were repeated, and there were a couple who started but were getting it wrong. So that’s like the ‘evidence’ here. There’s also a philosophical point. Let’s say it’s right that it was just Danny and he really struggles with attention – don’t you think that means we just need to work harder? We can’t just say ‘well he lacks focus’, we need to do something to make sure he is focusing. He’s more likely to not listen, we need to do more to bring him in. And that takes us to strategies, because I think there are some easy things we can do to make sure that next time he is listening…”

SIDEBAR: Before we pull out the general point, it’s important to note that I think it’s ok to tell people you don’t agree. It’s ok to be honest with colleagues, provided you are

  1. Respectful in terms of your tone
  2. Supportive in terms of being able to provide next steps
  3. Evidence based in terms of the impact on students

If you’re interested more in this approach, see here.

Once those items are in play, we owe it to each other to be honest, even if sometimes that can be challenging (for us and them!).

There’s a general point here about strategies, outcomes and causes. If there’s an outcome in a lesson that we didn’t like or don’t want, it’s really easy to point to root causes that are beyond our control. The problem is that often there are things within our control that we could be doing, and if we were doing them, we might get different outcomes. This is a lesson that I learned hard in my own practice, and it’s one I battle with constantly. Looking in the mirror at yourself and forensically searching your practice for things you can do better is much harder, much less comfortable, than pointing to an externality, but it’s often more fruitful in the short term, and more professionally satisfying in the long term.

In all these cases it could well be that this class is really hard to engage, or this student struggles with attention. But there’s a bar we need to clear before we can actually conclude that. Are we doing all of the things that should work? If we are, and they still aren’t working, then maybe we need to take a different approach. If we aren’t – and we normally aren’t -, then we need to clear that bar before we do anything else.