What I’m doing to change schooling in my classroom – and how it’s worked
Lesson plan. Lecture. Notes. Test. Rinse. Repeat.
We’ve all seen classrooms that operate like this. In fact, I’m sure that we’ve all been in classrooms that have operated like this. Mine wasn’t so different when I started teaching. I still vividly recall my first year: part of our drama 9 curriculum was to teach the history of drama. Wet behind the ears and grinning with the knowledge that I had a full-time job where most of my university cohort had only substitute teacher positions, I set to work.
I developed a series of riveting lectures on the history of drama, from old fertility rituals enacted to bring about fecundity in fallow soil, all the way to absurdist American drama of the late 20th century. I lectured, and some of my students wrote some of it down. Mostly they talked, and chatted with each other, and kept on interrupting me by telling me that what we were doing was boring. This made me alternatively furious and amused: furious that my authority was being questioned by a group of fourteen-year-olds, and amused because if they didn’t pay
