It’s all very well having great expectations of our students, but we must give them means to understand great works of literature.
The first lesson I taught as an NQT was in a rather challenging school. It was Year 8 ‘bottom’ set. I was told to teach them Louis Sachar’s ‘Holes’ and was assured that it was okay to set lesson objectives that were entirely focussed on behaviour. To get most of the students to stay in their seat for most of the lesson with little profanity and few arguments was to be considered a success.
A little apprehensive, feeling like an amateur, I arrived to find the classroom door open but the room empty. I sat down and waited. Then I heard a snigger from one of the lockers that lined the wall. A little cough came from another one. Not entirely sure how to proceed when your students, in your first ever lesson, decide to hide from view – and not having addressed this during my teacher training – I decided to do what I was intending to do anyway: read the novel. So, I did.
I just read the book aloud. One by one the students emerged from the lockers. They looked a little bemused. Most of them decided to sit on the floor. The others sat on desks. And I kept reading. At the end of Chapter 2, I tried to hand out a worksheet with some simple comprehension questions for them to complete. The look in their eyes suggested this wasn’t going to end well so I asked if they wanted to do some work or to just keep on reading. All of them opted for the latter.
Over the next few weeks, that’s all we did. Read a novel, talk about what had just happened and what might happen next. Slowly we started to pause every now and then to draw the characters or act out what had gone on. We never got around to lesson objectives about sitting in chairs because, most of the time, we didn’t. I don’t know how much they learnt in terms of assessments and other progress measures. But they did learn something and I learned a lot.
Now, quite a few years later, I still return to this. Students, in my experience, love to ‘read’, though many of them want to be read to. They can absorb the huge complexity of a literary work – the plot, the settings, the characters – if the story is read in a fluent, coherent manner. Audiobooks have been a revelation as the narrators are professionals. I am not. Audiobooks can be paused leaving space for discussion, can be rewound for emphasis. Alternatively, trying to read around the class means that multiple voices play the part of a single character and the fluency of the reading is, at best, erratic, a little like watching an amateurish film in which a different actor turns up every minute or so to play the same character.