Turning a Fun Lesson into a Successful Lesson
Posted: Monday, October 19, 2009
by Rob Plevin
Behaviour Needs
Having a fun classroom and teaching a fun lesson isn't enough to stop behaviour problems, and it isn't going to miraculously transform your challenging students into hard-working, diligent stars. Without knowledge, understanding and application of other key teaching and classroom management skills a FUN lesson with challenging students may well turn into a free-for-all and only serve to build you a reputation as a walk-over.
If challenging students are to feel truly involved in a lesson they need to be given opportunities to develop, grow, improve and feel a sense of accomplishment and achievement. They can still have fun but it is more productive if the fun comes from interacting with each other, finding out, working out, building, trying, experimenting, practicing and doing. They don't get these things from just sitting back and watching or messing around.
I like to use the simple analogy of your pupils each carrying an emotion rucksack' on their backs as they enter your lessons. If they arrive with the feeling that the lesson (based on their previous experience) is something they will have to ENDURE for the next hour something that is boring, irrelevant to their lives or perhaps embarrassing or difficult their rucksack will be filled with NEGATIVE emotions before they even set foot through the door.
Teaching pupils who have preconceived negativity towards your lessons is the HARD way to teach. It's very difficult getting students to engage when they have already made up their minds that the lesson isn't something they're going to enjoy or get any benefit from.
The easy way is to have them actually LOOKING FORWARD to a lesson carrying a rucksack with a little bit of INTRIGUE, perhaps recollections of a few LAUGHS they had last lesson or a feeling of SUCCESS and ACHIEVEMENT having UNDERSTOOD a difficult concept for the first time. Isn't that what education is all about?
Can we plan to include genuinely interesting activities which take account of students' strengths and interests, promote participation and collaboration and create a desire to learn and discover? Can we create lessons where all pupils feel valued, connected, involved and have a chance to achieve, succeed and develop new skills? Can we make our lessons interesting as opposed to boring'? Can we create a fun classroom and a fun lesson which doesn't just turn into a waste of time?
Yes we can.
Cooperative learning activities, attention grabbing starters, learning games, relevant subject content, ability-appropriate tasks, music, energisers and brain-breaks, novel plenary activities, anecdotes, analogies, role play, humour breaks, exciting demonstrations and truly engaging lesson structures can all be learned and planned into any lesson. Indeed, excellence can be planned into lessons and the following resource will show you exactly how:
www.needsfocusedlessons.com
The aim of the Needs-Focused Lessons program is to provide any teacher with thetools, resources and activities that will help them plan and deliver not so much a fun lesson as an OUTSTANDING' lesson.
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Top-level comments on this article: (3 total)An "outstanding lesson" is like an unreachable star, the endless, enduring search for perfection, life's marathon, an impossible aspiration. Well, this is how I saw it before I met with the needs-focus approach. Now it all seems like a golden opportunity to aspire to those visions of "outstanding" and I truly believe through evidence already gathered, that that star is not so difficult to reach after all. I look forward to the journey and I'll let you know when I reach Elysium. If the needs-focus approach doesn't get me there, nothing will!Thanks for your inspiring article.
An informative article Rob. Would there be a chance of you writing one based on emotional intelligence?"Seal" is an area of particular interest to me and something I want to develop at my school.
The needs focus approach would seem to fit in closely with developing area of student development.
Good points raised. Problem students, for whatever reason who are committed to resist any form of teaching always pose a big problem for smooth classroom management. Ideas apart from the usual, expel such students or try to force teach them are always welcome.
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