Lesson observations and inspirational strategies

Being a head of department means I get to see some outstanding lesson observations every cycle, I am amazed at the creativity of lesson activities and the way that students engage with the lesson. OFSTED rated our secondary school as OUTSTANDING across all 4 areas in 2013, this prompted the transition of lesson observations and teaching to the idea of 'inspirational-strategies'.

As part of our school lesson plan we, as classroom practitioners, are encouraged to include what inspirational strategies we are employing within that lesson. My lesson observation was to my year 8 group who are currently looking at the scheme of work 'global fashion' and pthe lesson was on the conditions of factories in LEDC's. As the starter activity pupils came into the room and entered their 'factory' in groups. Pupils had just 5 minutes to make as many 'paper trainers' as possible. Every 30 seconds I would shout out instructions such as 'factory A has closed down because their workers drank from the tap and they now have cholera' etc; the pupils really engaged with the activity. This made me think that playing a quick game or a quick activity like that really can be simple yet so effective. After all, it only required a template of a trainer, scissors and paper.

An outstanding colleague of mine had a lesson ob with his year 7's on the Masai Mara. His inspirational strategy was also used in his starter where pupils moved round the room looking at artifiacts from Kenya, the task was to see what pupils could learn about the country they were going to study before they were introduced to it. The pupils were amazed at the photos that said teacher had taken from his holiday across Kenya. Pupils were hooked by the artwork and it's vibrant colours. Just seeing that activity was inspirational for me, let alone the pupils.

This led me to the conclusion that we have so many opportunities to inspire our young adults and we really should be taking these opportunities. I firmly believe that it will improve the participation, behaviour and attainment of our young adults. As a teacher, it is our job to teach, whether that be content for an exam, life skills, or societal values, but we don't need to do that by asking pupils to turn to page 133 and answer questions 1-5 before writing a diary entry.

So, look ahead to your sequence of lessons, what can you do to really hook pupils into a topic?