Influence: lessons from business for teaching, part 3

Background

If you’ve read Part 1 or Part 2, you can skip this bit and go straight to Part 3. If not, it’ll help.

Car dealers. Marketing executives. Phone companies. Waiters. Teachers. What do we all have in common? We all want people to do what we want. Buy stuff, read stuff, eat stuff, do stuff, don’t do stuff, do stuff differently.

It’s not always easy, though. Usually the stuff you (we) want people to do is stuff they aren’t already doing. Or if they are doing it, they aren’t doing it enough, or in quite the right way. We all know that though. So, why this blog?

Well, there I was, idly flicking through Freakonomics Radio, when I came across an episode called How To Get Anyone To Do Anything. Always a sucker for a quick fix (Get rock hard abs fast without exercise or diet? Yes please!) I dived in.

The episode was an interview with Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: the psychology of persuasion. First published in 1984 and, I’m told, a classic of the genre, it was updated in 2021, hence the podcast. In it, Cialdini takes host Stephen Dubner through some of the key principles that people he calls “compliance professionals” use to get us to do those things they want us to, but which we probably wouldn’t without some gentle encouragement.

It was good. So I bought the book. And in this short series of blogs, I’m going to outline some of Cialdini’s theories and how they might be applicable to various roles in school. He identifies seven “levers of influence” but I’ll stick to four: liking, social proof, authority, and commitment and consistency.

A couple of disclaimers: I haven’t interrogated Cialdini’s sources, nor sought corroboration for his claims. I also note from various reviews that lots of other people have said and written similar things, and no doubt some have contradicted them. Be that as it may, I found lots of the book was relatable and applicable to teaching, and I thought you might too. Here goes.

Part 3: Authority

In this chapter, Cialdini explains that “we are trained from birth to believe that obedience to proper authority is right and disobedience is wrong. This message fills the parental lessons, schoolhouse rhymes, stories and songs of our childhood and is carried forward in the legal, military and political systems we encounter as adults.” We can all relate to this: accepting the advice of a doctor, even if it’s unexpected; obeying police instructions to move along, even if we don’t want to; going to lessons when the bell rings, even if we don’t fancy it. (You can decide for yourself whether the last of those relates to teachers or pupils.)

I know there are exceptions to all of these. Dr Internet can help us challenge our GPs; some people simply haven’t been through Cialdini’s “parental lessons” or stories and songs. But, for the most part, deference to authority exists. So we might as well use it to our advantage.

First, let’s make sure people will view us as being in authority. Cialdini notes several ways to do this. One, get a title. Easy: we all have one as teachers, be it Mr, Ms, Dr or whatever. I know some schools are all for first names, but they are the exception. Two, clothing. Again, easy. Wear something smartish and you’re on the way. It’s not as good as a uniform but it helps. Three, trappings: costly clothing, expensive jewellery, a nice car. Much less easy, but according to Cialdini mall shoppers were 79% more likely to fill in a survey and homeowners donated to charity 400% more frequently if the person asking them wore a designer sweater.

Second, be a credible authority. Again, we have a huge head start. People are much more likely to go along with the advice of those they deem to have expertise, and we’re all experts in our subjects – or at least, more expert than the pupils. You’ll have seen this in class, when you’ve given what you know to be a pretty flaky answer to a good question and the student has accepted it, largely because it came from you. (Come on, I’m not the only one.)

Finally, be a trustworthy authority. Often trust takes time to build, for obvious reasons. But a clever way to shortcut this, Cialdini says, to admit to a weakness up front, especially if it will anyway become apparent later. I can imagine doing this: “Now, I always find this section particularly difficult, because there are so many competing opinions/variables/ways for things to wrong.” Come to think of it, that also has the benefit of giving your students permission to fail: if you find it hard, it’s fine for them to find it hard too, so there’s no shame in getting things wrong. Win win.

If I’m honest, this isn’t my favourite of Cialdini’s chapters. There’s so much more to being an effective authority than looking right, sounding right and having a title. The good thing, though, is that we don’t have to do much to ensure we benefit from his ideas, and we can easily add the authority principles to those of liking (part 1 of this super soaraway series of blogs) and social proof (part 2), we really might find that people will do what we ask more often and with less effort on our part.

Summary: keep your title; look the part; revel in your expertise; but remember that there’s lots more to authority than a Rolex.

Next time: commitment and consistency.

Influence: lessons from business for teaching, part 2

Background

If you read Part 1 you can skip this bit and go straight to Part 2. If not, it’ll help.

Part 2: Social Proof

According to Cialdini, the principle of social proof states that “we determine what is correct by finding out what other people think is correct…We view an action as correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it [his emphasis].”

We’ve all done this. The example that springs to my mind is that on busy trains, we all stand in silence, just like everyone else. Cialdini notes that the best way to increase sales of a particular dish in a restaurant is not to call it the “chef’s recommendation” or “speciality of the house,” but to say it’s the most popular dish. Similarly, the “fastest growing” product is advertising gold. (I confess to having used this myself, to raise the numbers of people choosing my A-Level. I did it as a bit of a joke – “Join Presdales School’s fastest growing subject!” – and prefer to ascribe the subsequent doubling* of take-up as evidence of my magnetic personality.)

Cialdini explains that people are especially likely to follow the lead of others in the following circumstances:

When there is an element of unfamiliarity and/or uncertainty. You’ll have seen this at the beginning of every school year, when groups of children will willingly follow one of their peers to their next classroom, whether or not that peer really knows where they are going. Everyone else is following them, so I’d better too, right?
When the people whose behaviour they are witnessing are similar to themselves. This goes with the above, but extends to the fact that people are also more likely to take advice from peers. Cialdini cites a school anti-smoking programme, which had best effects when it was delivered by people of the same age as the pupils. At my current school, an International Mens’ Day-themed assembly – basically, about how it’s OK to be male and vulnerable – delivered to Year 7 and 8 by some supercool Year 11s, got rave reviews and requests for more presentations from fellow pupils.

There’s lots we can learn here, I think. In the past, and quite probably still, Katharine Birbalsingh’s Michaela School has invited all its new pupils to pre-joining “boot camp,” so that they can learn exactly how they are expected to behave in school. This capitalises on social proof: the pupils are unfamiliar with the circumstances and each other and uncertain of how to behave, so particularly receptive to social proof. Thus, when they see everyone around them behaving in a certain way, they are very likely to follow suit. This will be reinforced when school starts for real, and they see all the other pupils behaving similarly. I don’t know whether Michaela deploy current students to help explain the rules at boot camp, but Cialdini’s principles would suggest that they should.

Social proof could also be married with the “liking” principles explained in Part 1 of this world beating series. It seems to me that if you can persuade influential people to behave in a certain way, the power of social proof will be magnified still further. So, we could drop compliments, possibly indirectly, towards those people, about particular things they have done – and, critically, the traits they have shown – and that we want to reinforce. Or – or perhaps and – we could explain in assembly how delighted we are to see so many people acting considerately to others in lessons. Even better, we could ask a pupil to do it: “I was really worried when I came that because I was the only one from my school I would find it hard to make friends, but everyone has been so kind and welcoming that I have really loved it.” Beautiful.

But, there’s a catch. Cialdini explains that in harnessing social proof to promote the good, we mustn’t accidentally normalise the bad. He gives two examples relating to teenagers. “After a suicide prevention program informing New Jersey teenagers about the alarming number of adolescents who take their own lives, participants became more likely to see suicide as a potential solution to their own problems. After exposure to an alcohol use deterrence program…junior high school students came to believe that alcohol use was more common among their peers than they’d originally thought.” In both cases, the aim had been to use social proof to encourage people in the right direction, but by normalising the harmful behaviour, some people at least considered moving the opposite way. They too had social proof, with possibly disastrous consequences.

This is a real issue, I think. A PSHE session on eating disorders: vital information for pupils, or an introduction to, and normalisation of, something they may not otherwise have considered? Drugs awareness: critical to warn of the dangers, or a window into a world of new possibilities? And so on. It may be that the one is impossible without the other: we can’t not cover drugs, alcohol etc. But if Cialdini – and, let’s be honest, our own intuition – is right, we need to think very carefully about the unintended consequences and what we might do about them. Maybe we do nothing, but at least we will have made a decision to do nothing.

To sum up: your pupils are very likely to do what other pupils are doing; will take advice from peers; are particularly likely to do both when feeling uncertain or unfamiliar; and beware of supplying social proof for the wrong things.

Next time: authority.

*Possibly not quite doubling. It was a while ago now.

Influence: lessons from business for teaching, part 1

Background

Part 1: Liking

“Few of us would be surprised to learn that we are more influenced by the people we like.” Sure thing. Cialdini breaks down “liking” into a range of categories, which are more helpful to us as teachers. I know, I know, we don’t want the children to be our friends, and getting them to like us is not our primary, or even secondary or tertiary, aim. Nevertheless, getting on well with pupils (and parents) can have many benefits, perhaps especially in the pastoral context.

Cialdini says you can increase the chances of people liking you, and therefore your ability to influence them, though several routes.

Physical attractiveness. Obvious, really. But if you are not favoured in the looks department, fear not: there are other ways too.
Similarity. Claim, or find, similar interests to your interlocutor and you’re onto a winner. Anyone who has ever struck up a conversation with a difficult pupil about something they and you both like – cooking, fish, football, painting, fashion, whatever – and felt that, at last, you might be getting through to them knows this. (Top Tip: If you have any interest at all in football, make sure you have a Fantasy team. Teenage boys in particular are obsessed with it and are amazed and delighted to find out that you are too. If you have a staff league, so much the better: they also love to know that the Head of PE is in eighth place and the Physics teacher they’ve never really bothered about has just transferred in Mo Salah.) According to Cialdini, an initial similarity of interests is the single most important factor in a mentor-student relationship. Worth bearing in mind when you are thinking about pastoral match-ups.
Praise. “We are phenomenal suckers for flattery.” Remarkably, Cialdini says flattery doesn’t have to be genuine and it doesn’t even matter if the flatteree knows you are complimenting them because you want something. It still makes them like you. So, give lots of praise. Not only that:
- Give compliments behind someone’s back. Don’t just tell someone they’ve done well. Instead, or in addition, identify someone close to the flatteree, and tell them the person has done well. If you’ve chosen the link person well, the person’s form tutor, perhaps, the compliment will be passed on and you’ll be safe from accusations of ulterior motives. I can also imagine this working if, for some reason, a direct compliment from you wouldn’t go down well – if, for example, the flatteree would deem it death-inducingly uncool to be called out for doing something good by their Head of Year.
- Give compliments about the kinds of behaviour you want to see replicated. This will encourage people to live up to the standards you want to inculcate. Cialdini gives a really nice example. His paperboy used to throw his newspaper into his porch, as opposed to nearby where it might get wet, about 75% of the time. After a Christmas card and tip thanking the paperboy’s conscientiousness in getting the delivery right almost all the time, the success rate went up to 100%. Apparently it’s crucial to compliment a trait as well as action: in this case, not just delivering the paper well, but also the boy’s conscientiousness in doing so. That makes the boy feel conscientious and want to continue to live up to that label. So, not just, “Thank you for picking up that crisp packet,” but, “Thank you for your thoughtfulness in picking up that crisp packet.”
Conditioning and association. “Merely communicating negative news affixes to the communicator a pair of devil’s horns that, in the eyes of the recipients, apply to other characteristics, “ says Cialdini. This is bad news for pastoral leaders, who often find themselves dishing out the serious sanctions and therefore, if this “horns effect” is real, being seen as generally horrible. Happily, it works the other way too. Advertisers use gorgeous models because, per point 1 above, we “like” physical attractiveness and will associate that good feeling with whatever it is we are being sold. It’s also why companies are so keen to be the official hairspray/umbrella/tea towel of the Olympics (Olympics = good, so official Olympics tea towel = also good), and why politicians seek celebrity endorsements. This is the “halo” counterpart to the horns effect. We can learn from this: if you are someone who has to tell people off a lot, risking the horns effect, make sure that isn’t the only communication you have with those individuals. Show them your halo, be that a shared interest, a compliment, or the certificate that only you give out – even if, given 3a above, it’s best that someone else actually passes it on.

To sum up: in some circumstances at school, it’s helpful for people to like you. To aid that process, you could find or develop similar interests; give compliments, even ones that aren’t genuine, possibly indirectly, that reinforce traits you like; associate yourself with good things as well as bad; and if you are so blessed, work your looks.

Next time: social proof, or why we often look to what others are doing to decide what we should do, and how we as teachers can harness that.

“Obvious, obvious, obvious.” CLT: just so right?

I recently watched and very much enjoyed this webchat between Oliver Lovell and Tom Sherrington. Lovell has recently written Sweller’s Cognitive Load Theory in Action, and Sherrington was interviewing him about it.

About 24 minutes in, Sherrington asks Lovell for “the main thing that teachers should do.” Lovell gives three things to avoid:

Redundancy: cut out anything you don’t need. Anything redundant wastes precious working memory.
Transience: for example, when running through a powerpoint, remember that the information is transient. It’s on slide one, but not slide two, three or four, but you still need the class to remember it, and that takes up working memory.
Split attention: “information that must be combined, should be together in space and time.” Sort of a development of transience, I think.

Good stuff. Eminently and evidently sensible. So much so that Sherrington describes it, in a much more complimentary way than will come across on the page, as “Obvious, obvious, obvious.” He’s not belittling Lovell’s ideas. Rather, he is praising Lovell for his research-based clarity of thought and expression, and the obvious link between Cognitive Load Theory and Lovell’s practice. Nice.

I agree. I think Lovell’s suggestions are excellent. They are indeed obvious, once you come to think about them. What’s more, they just feel right.

The problem is that other things just feel right too, even when they’re wrong. Way back in 2008 the great Daniel Willingham, of whom I am an enormous fan (ask any of my classes), made a video called Learning Styles Don’t Exist. I’m sure that somewhere he once apologised for its “garage band quality”, which I rather liked, but the information is good and, as it happens, I buy it. Of particular interest, though, is that Willingham himself says that the learning styles theory, specifically the visual/auditory/kinaesthetic variety, “seems to make a lot of sense.” He even asks, “Why does it seem so right?”

He says there are three reasons:

Because everyone believes it;

Because something close to the theory is right;

Because of confirmation bias (though he doesn’t use that term).

I think you could apply a lot of that to CLT, or rather to the way CLT is being used in the classroom. As Sherrington implies, Lovell’s suggestions “seem to make a lot sense,” and so they do. It may even be that they are sensible because they derive from CLT. But it may not.

I recently highlighted some doubts about the robustness of the methodology underpinning CLT experiments. (To save you a read: it’s not clear that we can measure cognitive load very well, which to me begs the question of whether we should be building theories of education on it.) Be that as it may, once you’re into cognitive load, you see it everywhere and it explains everything.

Your students wrote rubbish essays? You probably overloaded their working memory with new information. They can’t factorise? I expect you didn’t do enough worked examples. They forgot to bring their swimming kit? Well, that was one of four messages you gave out in form time yesterday.

Alternatively, perhaps you explained the essay really badly. Maybe, during your factorising lesson, they were all thinking about inter-form football later on. Perhaps they were hungry in form time, or focused on the latest gossip. The CLT explanation might feel right, but is it? How can you know?

Ironically, perhaps, Willingham’s VAK video makes a similar point. He imagines a teacher trying to explain the structure of the atom, but “it’s not really clicking. Finally, you say, ‘Picture the solar system. The nucleus of the atom is like the Sun, and the electrons are like the planets spinning round it.’ The student understands and you think, ‘Aha! The student must be a visual learner.’ But maybe that was just a good analogy that would have helped any student, or maybe the student needed just one more example for the idea to click. Why the student understood at that point is actually ambiguous.” (My emphasis.)

The same could be said of CLT. You’ve read about it, maybe been to talk or a webinar. So you strip down your explanations, use worked examples, rid your slides of diversions and – ta-dah! – your students ace the test. Cause and effect? Maybe. Probably your teaching, free of frills and frippery, was clearer and sharper, and thus more likely to produce the desired results. But can you be sure that was due to your adherence to CLT? Or was it just that you thought harder about how you were going to explain things? As Willingham says, “if you already believe, ambiguous situations are interpreted as consistent.”

I’ve written before about the the seduction of quick clarity: the danger that we alight on something that seems to make logical and accessible sense of a difficult and nuanced issue – teaching, for example. CLT certainly seems logical and can be made accessible: witness this by Adam Boxer. That doesn’t make it right – VAK wasn’t, after all – but it will still lead us to teach in particular ways and, perhaps damagingly, not in others. That’s for next time, though.

First Impressions

OK, so this one’s a list rather than a diagram, but it’s day four and I’m flagging a bit.

Effectiveness It derives from some Harvard University research into whether the first impressions we make as teachers are predictive of how good we are at our jobs. Somewhat disconcertingly, the clear answer is yes. Within two seconds – two seconds – students can form an impression of us that will correlate remarkably closely with how we are rated by our superiors. And those impressions will be based not on what we say, but on what we do: our non-verbal behaviour.

That raises all sorts of questions, some of which I addressed in this article. But for the purposes of this short blog, just know this: the traits you display in class may well predict how are good you are at your job.

The lists above are the traits on which the Harvard professors asked pupils to score their teachers. The higher people scored in the list on the right, the better teachers they were. (In the list on the left, Anxious was negatively scored – so the lower the rating, the better as it meant they were Not Anxious.)

So how do you come across as Enthusiastic, Confident, Dominant etc? The research suggests this:

Body language

So there you go. Walk around confidently; smile enthusiastically; touch your upper torso dominantly; be a better teacher.

Good Question Questions

“Good Question” Questions

Mainly, questions in lessons are good. They suggest interest, curiosity, a willingness to try something out or to ask for help.

However, not all questions are equal. After observing several lessons and noting down the pupils’ questions, I think they can be grouped like this:

Questions Capture

“How to do it” questions

These were the most common. Pupils ask them to make sure they understand what they are being asked to do. Here are some examples:

Can we take notes on this?
Should we put a cross or a tick?
How should we structure this essay?
Do we only add three things?

These aren’t bad questions but they are a bit annoying: they take up time which could be used on other things and they reflect the fact that either you haven’t explained properly or they haven’t been listening, or both. They don’t add much to your lesson, and can be avoided.

“Clarificatory” questions

I like these questions better. They are ones through which students try to clarify their understanding of a particular issue. They may not drive the lesson forward, but they will probably help ensure that the foundations are secure. For example:

Do you have to re-sign Executive Orders every 90 days? (Bit niche but fellow teachers of US Politics will back me on this one.)
Does sea or land heat quicker?
Is judicial activism something which overturns a ruling?
What was that thing you said about Labour’s rise in the 1970s?

Nothing wrong with these at all, but they probably aren’t the ones that make you say, “Good question!”

“Thanks but” questions

These are the ones which represent the opening of the rabbit hole. Perhaps something more tempting than a rabbit hole, actually; sometimes they offer the possiblity of an interesting tangent, a beautifully freeform, off the cuff discussion. Such questions may well reflect an inquiring mind and some genuine interest, but they threaten to derail your lesson. Hence the “Thanks, but…” Some examples:

[In a lesson about the UK constitution:] Does the constitution really exist?
[In a lesson about the transmission of disease:] AIDS, is that what Freddy Mercury died of?
[In a lesson about the 2017 election:] Why does the left wing see the media as so biased against them when there is so much media attention on minor gaffes like fields of wheat, rather than on big issues like Corbyn being friends with Hamas?

“Good question” questions (GQQs)

These are the ones you really want. They take whatever it is you are discussing and move it on a level. Unlike “Thanks buts”, these ones do make you say, “Good question.” They show interest, understanding and curiosity and they are relevant. For example:

[In a lesson about the formation of tropical storms:] Why are tropical storms not found on the equator since it’s an area of low pressure?
[In a lesson about the transmission of disease:] So, a doctor could be infected?
I know second term US presidents are supposed to have less power of persuasion, but haven’t they built up good relations with Congress by then, which should help?

For more on all this, including how to get more of the right sort of questions, click here.

Ratio

Totally ripped off from Adam Boxer, this one. I claim no credit whatsoever. Here’s the diagram:

Ratio

So clear, so simple, so effective. Your lessons need to be in the top right hand quadrant for as much of the time as possible.

The only thing I’d add, which probably goes without saying which is probably why Adam doesn’t say it, is that your students need to be thinking hard about the right stuff. I know lots of my students will be thinking hard if I walk into the room with my flies undone, but it probably won’t help their understanding of the Treaty of Versailles.

There are implications for your teaching practice, though. Here are ten things that sometimes happen in class. It’s worth considering where they fit on the graph and whether, therefore, they offer good teaching value.

Group discussion in which you take only those hands that go up.
Group discussion when you ask people rather than using hands up, but in which your main aim is to get everyone to speak.
Inviting one person to write their ideas on the board.
Individual work.
Group work.
A whole class debate, properly set up with speakers proposing and opposing the motion.
Resources with lots of clip-art style pictures to make them fun.
Making a poster to display information they’ve found out.
Writing a newspaper front page to describe a pivotal moment, complete with adverts for the grrrrreat competition on page four.
Making a model of a First World War trench/a cell/the solar system/an oxbow lake.

And if you’re observing a lesson, the diagram is a good framework to discuss what you saw.

For more on this, including from the Boxer’s mouth, try this presentation, this blog and this one.

Progress

Progress.

It’s what we all want to see. People progressing in our subject. Brilliant.

Now, “progress” is a contentious and complex term. But for the purposes of this blog I’m going to cut the crap. Today, it means “getting better at your subject.” You can define “better” however you like – that’s one for your department meetings. Here, it just means “better.”

Everyone knows one thing about progress, however defined: it’s got to be inexorable. No backsliding or false starts or dips. Only endless, upwards, momentum. Everything must always be getting better.

Unfortunately, progress in your subject won’t look like that (and if it does, you’re not looking hard enough). Instead, it will look like the graph below.

Progress

Start of year. Let’s assume they arrive somewhere above the bottom of the Y axis.
Steady progress. They’re enthused, you’re refreshed and well prepared.
Fire practice. Not much done today, and it meant they missed homework.
A difficult concept. Needs quite a lot of explaining and will need going over again.
But, they got it!
Unexpectedly busy few days with your sick child/mother/cat/car. Not much time for planning. Lessons feel adequate at best.
Everyone got their parents to do that homework.
You’re poorly. You’re trying, but you know you’re not on top of your game.
A good few steady weeks. They’re interested and it’s one of your favourite topics.
Lesson badly derailed by vaccinations/MidYis assessment/careers interviews.
Data provided for OFSTED.
End of year exams. I mean, what do they show, exactly?
Summer holidays. Everyone forgets everything.

So next time someone asks you why Child X or Class Y are not “progressing”, first explain that it depends what you mean by progress, and second deploy any or all of the factors above. Sorted, and repeat to retirement.

My worst ever lesson

Background

I’m early in my teaching career. I am teaching History to the bottom Y9 set. The class of about 18 pupils had been together ever since Y7: always the bottom set, in everything. I don’t know them well yet, but we have already developed a slightly up and down relationship.

We are about to start a new topic. It’s a subject I know nothing about. I have had a look at the existing worksheet and it’s poor: complicated, uninteresting, bad questions. I haven’t had time to improve it, nor to think properly about the answers I want them to give. I place my trust in the fact that, as the sheet is in the filing cabinet, it must have worked before.

What happened

Things go badly more or less from the outset. The class arrive in slightly ragged fashion, as per. They take their usual seats, arranged in groups of four or five. I don’t insist on complete silence and attention while I’m explaining what to do. Nevertheless, I set them off on the worksheet.

The text is difficult and immediately I am met with a chorus of “I don’t get it.” There is little work and lots of irrelevant chat. I know I am losing them, and we’re only a few minutes in. I decide to rearrange the seating, then and there.

We put the desks into rows, each a distance apart from the others. I re-seat them so the most difficult ones are apart from each other. I say that there must be ABSOLUTELY NO TALKNG AT ALL or there will be SERIOUS CONSEQUENCES.

I notice one girl chatting chat with a neighbour. I bawl her out: “LAUREN! WHY ARE YOU TALKING WHEN I HAVE SPECIFICALLY TOLD YOU NOT TO? LAUREN? LAUREN!”

Oh crap. She’s not Lauren. Lauren is sitting quietly across the room, wondering why I am yelling at her a) for no reason and b) while looking at someone else. Julia, the actual culprit, is enjoying it hugely. Everyone else is sniggering.

Deep breath. Apologise to Lauren and Juliet – “But of course that doesn’t mean, Juliet, that you didn’t break the rules. You’re in detention.”

Still no work done. I want to enthuse them with some fascinating facts about the subject but I can’t because I have none. So we plough on, with the pupils not really trying to do the work that neither they nor I properly understand.

I’ve pretty much lost all interest in the content by now; I just want them to BLOODY WELL DO AS I TELL THEM. They don’t, so I resort to accepting a level of conversation and getting round the class to help as much as I can (and if anyone will listen). We limp on until the bell rings.

What I learned

OK, no-one swore at me, punched anyone, or stormed out. But it was absolutely horrible because so many things went wrong and I could have prevented pretty much all of them:

I hadn’t set proper behavioural expectations. Neither the students nor I really knew exactly what was acceptable and what wasn’t, or what would happen if my standards, whatever they were, were not met.
I rearranged the room mid-lesson. What a kerfuffle.
I lost my cool and shouted, using the wrong names.
I used terrible resources, with which I had not properly engaged.
No-one learned any history.

Worst of all, I knew this was going to happen. I didn’t have the right relationship with the class to be able to get away with anything being sub-par, and I was finding it hard to control them at the best of times. As such, I was tense from the off. It wasn’t going to take a lot to tip me over the edge.

Back in the staff room, I have the thousand yard stare. My HoD notices. We talk. She advises.

Next lesson, the class and I have a review. We agree better rules of engagement. We gradually start to improve. By the end of the year we have a mutual appreciation society. Several of them take History GCSE. With exquisite irony, I end up with quite a lot of them in my set.

My worst ever resources

Background

GCSE History. I’m teaching the end of apartheid in South Africa to a very mixed ability class. We have got as far as the introduction of sanctions. I have decided that this is a very difficult concept that some in my class will struggle to understand. In my view, the best way to help them is to let them experience what trading under sanctions might be like.

So, I create The Sanctions Game. I choose a dozen countries from around the world. I allocate each a natural resource, or some expertise – something they can trade. The amount of resource they have depends on its value. For example:

Saudi Arabia: 5 x oil
Ecuador: 30 x bananas
South Africa: 10 x diamonds
UK: 15 x banking expertise
Belgium: 20 x chocolate

And so on. (I know the valuations are all out of kilter but bear with me, they were only illustrative.)

The class will be put into groups of 2-3 and each given a country. Each country will start with the goods or expertise it produces, plus a list of all the goods and expertise it needs. So the UK might need to acquire an oil, five bananas and two diamonds, while Ecuador needs an oil, a diamond and ten chocolates.

The groups will then try to trade what they have for what they want. I hope that the differing values will encourage the development of various exchange rates: surely South Africa won’t swap a diamond for only one chocolate? There’s also another layer of trickiness: Ecuador, for example, needs nothing the UK has, but the UK needs bananas from Ecuador? So the UK needs to find out what Ecuador wants and trading banking expertise for some of that, before returning to Ecuador to make the deal. Brilliant. The winning country will be the first to acquire all the items on its shopping list.

After one round to get the hang of it, we will start round two. This time, every country will get a secret instruction. For all bar South Africa, it will say, “DO NOT trade with South Africa.” South Africa’s will say, “If anyone won’t trade with you, try to do it in secret.” Then the game will begin again. And lo and behold, everyone will realise that sanctions make life very hard for the country on the end of them, but also impacts the countries imposing them.

What happened

I spend hours creating the game. I find pictures of every commodity, copy and paste them so I have the right number, cut them all out and put them in envelopes. This means 30 pictures of bananas, each individually snipped; 20 chocolates; five oils, and so on. I write out the rules and the secret instructions.

Once in class, I explain the game. Several times. The first round finishes in about five minutes as no-one bothers with exchange rates – they just get what they want without worrying about how much things are really worth. It takes ages to return all the goods to their original homes for round two. When that starts, it turns out that everyone is perfectly willing to deal openly with South Africa, despite their instructions.

I end up explaining sanctions to them myself. They have no problem with it. It wasn’t even that big a part of the course.

I had enjoyed thinking up and making the game, and in some ways I’m still quite proud of it; it sounds fun, doesn’t it? But I spent far, far too much preparation time on it. Card sorts are bad enough, though I do quite like them sometimes. This, though, was a card sort on steroids. Think of the other things I could have been doing instead.

I had massively overestimated the complexity of the concept at hand, and equally underestimated the ability of my students to get to grips with it. Yes, sanctions are a bit tricky to get hold of. But I think I must have realised that at about the same time as having a brilliant idea for a game, and married the two. As a result, the pupils picked up very little about sanctions, had the topic built up in their minds as Something Very Hard, and wasted valuable lesson time.

What I learned

To focus first on what I am going to teach, not how I am going to teach it. These days I only think about the latter when I am secure in the former. In this instance, even if the game had worked, the students would have gained only a superficial understanding of the pros and cons of sanctions. Nothing about why they were introduced, when, who by, on what goods and with what results.
To remember that good teaching doesn’t require massive creativity. It does require clear thought, good explanations and appropriate tasks.
That fun comes in many guises. It’s perfectly possible to have enjoyable lessons without games. In this case, for example, through an informed debate about the effectiveness, fairness and morality of sanctions. Less immediately grabbing than a game, but ultimately far more satisfying.
That pupils are more likely to remember what they think about. As a result of the Sanctions Game they would have remembered that they had lots of little tokens and had to buy stuff. The sanctions element – the whole point of the exercise – was too much of an afterthought.

You can read my other Worst Evers here:

My worst ever disciplinary decision

My worst ever assembly announcement

My worst ever form time