What's The Point?

As any experienced teacher will know, being crystal clear about the objectives of a lesson is vital to success.  But an even more vital question is: what should those objectives be?

We all have national curriculum programmes of study or exam specifications to cover and rightly, if we don't get these covered in the allotted time then we will be pulled up for it.  Most schemes of work are devised with the idea of covering the material in a given specification and the scheme will ensure that everything is covered in a given number of lessons.  There will also be time allocated to completing any controlled assessment or coursework, if there is any for that subject.

This is all very well, but inevitably, some learners will not make the progress that they should and some will be frustrated when they don't 'get' things that they think they should.  These learners can be in danger of their progress stopping altogether and they can become stuck.  Once learners are stuck, as any teacher knows, it can be a really difficult job to get them progressing again.

If learners are to progress at all they need certain attitudes.  Some learners come to us with these attitudes fairly well embedded and others come to us without them.  There has been a lot written recently about Dweck's growth mindset and encouraging students to adopt a growth mindset.  To an extent I am thinking of the attitudes that learners need in order to display a growth mindset, attitudes such as perseverance, reflection, risk taking, independence, collaboration, and realising that they are responsible for their own learning and that learning is not inflicted upon them.  I am certain that learners will not make the progress expected of them unless they are at least aware of these characteristics or even better, they have them embedded in their actions.

It is clear that lower achievers, and in fact some higher achievers, do not have these characteristics and progress for them, at least in some areas is difficult.  I firmly believe that for this group of students it is worth having lessons where the objective is to improve an attitude to learning, such as perseverance or risk taking.  The lesson can be successfully delivered through the medium of the subject that the learner is studying.  This is one of the occasions where displaying the objectives at the start of the lesson would make the lesson less effective.  It is important they the learners believe, at least initially, that they aren't doing anything out of the ordinary.  The lesson will be more effective if the objective emerges naturally from the tasks that the learners are engaged in during the lesson.

In my subject, computing, it is vital that the learners are risk takers and will persevere in the face of failure if they are to progress.  It is vanishingly rare a programmer working on a program will only meet success.  The usually experience is that a programmer will meet a series of setbacks - failure - that need to be overcome before the program works properly.  Recently I gave my Year 9 class a series of programming tasks of increasing difficulty.  The first ones they could do without too much effort, but when they were attempting the later ones they were experiencing more and more failures - increasingly they needed to persevere and take risks.

At the end of the lesson I asked the students how they felt when they were doing a task and failing repeatedly.  They could describe this really well; they talked about anger, frustration and annoyance.  I then asked them how they felt when they had completed a really difficult level.  Once more, their replies were excellent - elation, ecstatic and overjoyed.  I asked them to relate these two feelings and they soon realised that there was a direct relationship: the more they suffered the greater the feeling of success.  I then related this to perseverance and risk taking.  Most of them took on board the idea that these too attitudes are a requirement for success in programming.

I am certain that this experience will help the learners when we go on to more complex tasks.  At the very least I will be able to say to them, "Do you remember how you struggled and how you felt when you were successful?  You need to persevere and take risks on this task too.  Then you'll feel the success."