Do THIS to get your senior students involved in class

If you’ve got a senior class (Year 11 or 12), you know how important every single lesson is. 

But you also know that your senior students don’t always turn up ready to work. 

My favourite is when my Year 12 students, who have assessments in weeks and their major external examination in months, saunter into class pleading to “do something fun” this class.

I’m really sorry but we can’t play games. I apologise if you don’t see the required syllabus content as “fun” (let’s face it, I don’t either). But none of this means we can let a class slide.

So, what can you do? My suggestion is to centre the whole class around a past exam-style question.

Here’s the process

Let everyone come into class but don’t provide any preamble or explanation. Just put the question on the board. Or, even better, print out a copy for each student. I find that it helps with focus.

Then give the instruction: answer this question. Tell them if they can or can’t use notes (this is totally up to you). Give them a time limit too.

And then: remove yourself from the classroom. Not literally — you’ll encounter duty of care issues here. Just put your hands up and say, “I’m sorry, I can’t answer any of your questions. I’m not taking any questions right now.” Let them grumble and just move on.

Once the time is up, come back as a class and go through the question together. I suggest taking a board perspective and asking students follow-up questions such as (in no particular order):

• what are typical mistakes that students might make in a question like this?

• what syllabus dot points does this question relate to?

• what are some other ways of answering this question?

The key idea here is to put the students in the deep end. I’m not saying this is always guaranteed to work but it could be a useful strategy to try on those trying afternoons.