“The students should be doing more than you.” That’s what my mentor told me midway through my training year. My answer to that? A scavenger hunt, of course. My Year 9 class was studying Romeo and Juliet at the time and I was confident that the students could handle independent learning.

I had read up, I knew my stuff; it was time to plan. My objective: do nothing while they do everything.

I came up with the idea of creating groups of five, with each student given a position: the captain, the gatherer, the recorder, the speaker, the thinker. (“Ooh, this is good,” I congratulated myself.) They would visit four stations: Critics’ Corner, Academic Avenue, Quote Quarry, Character Cul-de-Sac.

It was inspired. I was orchestrating a Shakespearean scavenger hunt that was surely going to win me all the teaching accolades. And it took only two hours to plan: time that I would certainly claim back.

“And that’s what you’ve got to do,” I told my students. “Begin!”

This was it, I thought. Time to sit back, catch up on some marking, perhaps, and oversee my students as they went about their learning business.

I was met with blank stares. I decided I needed to be clearer in my instruction: “Gatherers, start gathering! Your thinker will know what you need. Captains, you should be delegating.”

The children started darting around the room, barking orders at each other. They were certainly engaged. And then it rapidly began to dawn on me - as I listened to what the speakers were saying and read what the recorders were writing - that this lesson was far from what I had envisioned. The children were learning nothing. It was chaos. I had no choice but to stop the activity dead in its tracks. “Return to your seats, take out your copy of the text, begin reading in silence.”

I had lost my cool. I felt awful. My pride had been wounded and my time spent without recompense. And it wasn’t the students who were to blame.

After that ill-fated scavenger hunt, I decided to abandon group work indefinitely.

But last month, in my first term as a recently qualified teacher, I finally felt brave enough to try again. I wanted my students to write an essay in collaboration, pulling together and sharing their strengths and expertise.

This time, my objective wasn’t about doing but rather about learning. I spent 20 minutes planning and creating resources: sentence starters, discourse markers, snippets of critical material, a model structure.

This time, I realised that there was no impact for the students in hunting for this information around the room. The impact was in their ability to work together, independently, with only the necessary scaffolds.

The outcome: I did nothing, they did everything. And the benefit wasn’t that I was gaining time or that I could catch up on marking (which I did, a little), but that the students were able to do it on their own, without me.

As I circulated the room, I felt invisible. And feeling invisible had never felt so good.

Sacha Carroll is an English teacher at Southend High School for Boys, Essex

This article originally appeared in the 5 February 2021 issue under the headline “There never was a story of more woe...”