What’s both the best and worst piece of advice for new teachers in circulation at the moment? I would suggest: “Don’t listen when people tell you behaviour will improve if your lessons are more interesting.”

On the one hand, there is an important truth within this statement that all teachers - particularly those in senior positions - would do well to keep in mind. But, as is so often the case, especially online, the necessary nuance is being lost. And the result is that some young teachers are struggling and feeling powerless unnecessarily.

Many teachers, often at the start of their careers, are told by senior colleagues that the poor behaviour they face in the classroom is as a result of the nature of their lessons.

“Think how you can engage them,” they say. “Demonstrate how this is relevant to their lives. Make it fun.”

As a new teacher, I tried to act on this advice when designing pupil activities: creating 1066 Top Trumps; designing Facebook pages for historical figures; presenting the problems of the Weimar Republic in the style of a tabloid agony aunt photo story, titled “Dear Dietrich”.

And I wasn’t alone: one fellow PGCE student bought a magnetic dartboard and an infrared firing range to enliven his RE lessons.

Many such efforts took up hours of my time, as well as hours of pupil time in lessons, and resulted in no improvement in behaviour and little, if any, learning.

I am not surprised, therefore, that - having felt pressured to dispense with textbooks, to limit teacher talk arbitrarily and to shoehorn gimmicks unrelated to the subject material into their lessons - many teachers have subsequently felt vindicated and energised by the revolt against such thinking that has taken place on social media.

This seems to have successfully shifted Ofsted and Department for Education thinking, and perhaps even policy, towards approaches that are increasingly termed “traditionalist” - ditch the “mixers”, goes the line, and just teach them the content “neat”.

Pupils should behave in the classroom, as long as the teacher’s requests are reasonable. And completing activities that some may find dull falls well within the bounds of reasonable.

Diss engagement

But for some, pupil enjoyment and engagement now appears not just to have dropped down the list of priorities but to have dropped off it altogether. To take this approach is to leave one of our keenest weapons as educators unused.

Many self-described traditionalists love to mock a meme, admittedly of dubious origin, that circulates with some regularity on Twitter, which says that we “remember 10 per cent of what we read, 20 per cent of what we hear, 30 per cent of what we see”. What the mockers do not acknowledge is that a student, given frequent chances to reflect on and write about what they have just heard, will learn far more than one whose teacher is ploughing on regardless of whether or not the class is interested. What also remains unacknowledged is that delivering content in the same way every time can lead to trouble.

We do teachers a disservice if we deny that how they teach can have a positive impact on behaviour and learning. For example, I was asked to take on a history class whose behaviour had proved very difficult for colleagues to handle. Many of the group had not selected history as an option for the next year and had been openly asking what the point of their remaining lessons was.

The topic was the White Rose movement during the Third Reich. I began the lesson with the execution scene from the film Sophie Scholl: The Final Days. It is barely a minute in length, and there is no blood or gore, just a desperate young woman marching to one room to be barked at by seated officials, and then to another with a guillotine and executioner. The screen fades to black as the blade falls.

Why did I not just tell them about the events? Why did I employ such a hook? Well, because this class needed it. The previously apathetic students were now anything but and began firing questions at me in an attempt to make sense of what they had just seen. Some pupils later told me that they had researched Sophie Scholl further, in their own time, to find out more.

Would the class have been as interested if I had just told them the story? I doubt it.

Lost opportunities

When I see teachers online proudly announcing that they do not use their interactive whiteboards and have no intention of ever doing so, I despair at the opportunities to share a wealth of visual material that are being lost.

Attention is essential for learning. We can demand it and we may get some, but if we also actively seek it, we can expect more.

More attention, more learning. The old orthodoxy was that it must be lured somewhere, anywhere, lest it lend itself to mischief. The current one seems to be that it must be compelled to fall where we, as teachers, wish it.

While recognising the merits of the latter approach, we should have confidence in ourselves and the subjects that we teach - that we and they can draw the interest, gimmick-free. By all means drive for rigour.

But if we don’t also pay mind to our pupils’ enjoyment and interest, we’re not half the teachers we could be.

Andrew Foster is a teacher and former senior leader in a secondary school, and head of education at Tougher Minds

This article originally appeared in the 22 February 2019 issue under the headline “Want to grab pupils’ attention? Then use a hook”