On a rare marking-free weekend last year, I settled down to watch Dead Poets Society. I usually avoid education films like the plague, seeing them as a bit of a busman’s holiday.

But there on the screen was every English teacher’s fantasy - the engaged, inquisitive class who debated and cared and felt the literature they were reading in the very marrow of their bones. They reminded me of my own Year 10 class. I had been lucky enough to take them through from Year 8, and I was starting to feel the pressure, as the school had lofty expectations of them being high-achieving.

Watching Robin Williams in action got me thinking: what if I ditched the standard approach of secondary teaching and instead taught them as if they were undergraduates, as in Dead Poets Society? Would that ensure they reached their potential? Previously, the grades of some of our intake have not matched the promise of their Sats results, so I decided a new approach was worth a go.

The first step was to ascertain how different the two approaches really were. After much jotting down of notes and comparing my own experiences with those of others, I found it came down to one major difference: students’ ability and drive to self-regulate their own learning.

This was a problem. Apathy seemed to be at an all-time high, with students expecting teachers to spoon-feed them information, cramming everything they needed to know into hour-long sessions. They appeared to have no motivation to go away and explore their learning independently and in more depth.

Promoting metacognitive skills

In truth, as teachers, we can be guilty of simply providing this service: national performance measures crush our creativity and make us feel as though lessons need to be teacher-led in order that we can feed students the content required to pass exams. So, how could I force a change?

Luckily, as part of my psychology master’s research, I had been reading the Education Endowment Foundation’s guidance report, “Metacognition and self-regulated learning” (2018). It gave seven recommendations for how teachers and school leaders could better promote metacognitive and self-regulative skills in their classroom, so I set about integrating these into my plan for Year 11.

I narrowed down the strategies I should implement to the following: developing students’ ability to identify their strengths and weaknesses; teacher modelling; setting an appropriate level of challenge; and supporting students in organising their own learning.

The ideal opportunity to start came when the results from the end of Year 10 mocks were handed out in July. Operation Teach Them Like an Undergrad began during the first lesson back.

Usually, I would have spent hours scribbling comments on work, only for the students to ignore them and just look at the score. Instead, I wanted to encourage the class to become more self-regulated, and aware of their own strengths and weaknesses, without my input. With this in mind, I provided them with a mark scheme and, in groups of four - armed with dictionaries - they set about writing their own student-friendly mark schemes. They then used these to annotate their own scripts.

Mark of quality

By the next lesson, I had a set of improved answers to the mock questions of a much higher quality than I would have received previously. The students now understood what they needed to do to improve and had done so all by themselves.

This was no surprise to me: I had read the research suggesting that when self-regulated learners have agency over their learning before, during and after learning experiences, this increases effectiveness in future learning experiences (Bain, 2004; Siegesmund, 2017).

Next up was modelling. When I thought back to my time at university, academic skills were modelled to me by my lecturers: for example, they were widely read and knowledgeable, so I wanted to be, too.

To model my thinking and develop students’ cognitive skills, I introduced fortnightly journal sessions. The English literature mark scheme states that students must be “exploratory, critical and conceptualised” (AQA, 2015) to hit the top band, and I wanted to create an environment where these skills could be used on a regular basis.

I found articles about whichever text we were reading, and we discussed and made sense of them together. Soon enough, I could see the students adopting the language and methodologies I was modelling.

The essays also acted as a model for how students could use a thesis statement to set out their concept or argument at the start of their piece. Soon, their answers were more driven by concept and idea than repetitive language analysis.

Finally, I deviated from the rest of the department and chose to cover two challenging texts: Julius Caesar and Great Expectations. Both are much longer than the texts students were usually given, so I handed them out before the summer break. I made it clear they should be read before we came back to school. It was the students’ own little university-style reading list.

The outcome? Come September, we hit the ground running. There was no need to read the books in class time and students had already had to research unfamiliar concepts for themselves. Research suggests this can “promote and motivate deeper learning” (LaFee, 2013) and I certainly found this to be the case.

Of course, there were challenges to my change in approach. Some students were less motivated than others. As Caesar himself might have said, “Rome wasn’t built in a day”.

In some cases, whole attitudes to learning had to be changed and students needed the confidence to drive learning for themselves.

Close monitoring and encouragement helped the students to battle through, and when they began to see their grades going up, their participation improved.

Rising to the challenge

It was also difficult to ensure challenge while at the same time not overloading the class. I did not always get this right. For example, in a Year 11 mock exam, one student struggled with applying the new strategies we had learned and his answer read more like a history essay than an English one, with too much focus placed on context. However, we sat down and rewrote the answer together, and he could see where he had gone wrong. And I learned how to tweak my teaching approach.

But what about the impact on results? It was better than I ever could have imagined. In total, 12 pupils achieved grade 9 scores - 36 per cent of the class, compared with the national average of 2 per cent.

Just as rewarding, several students have since emailed me since to tell me they were top of their class at A level, because they were already familiar with the approach and the level of challenge. I am hoping the transition to university will be just as seamless.

Would I do the same with other groups? Without a doubt. I don’t believe in dumbing down for students who are working at lower attainment levels, so I will be giving any class I get at GCSE an opportunity to develop the same strategies. It works - and it is more enjoyable for the teacher, too.

Haili Hughes is an English teacher at Saddleworth School in Oldham, Greater Manchester. She tweets @HughesHaili

This article originally appeared in the 11 October 2019 issue under the headline “Why I treat my GCSE class like undergraduates”