You need to find a way to engage the students,” I was told after a lesson observation. “Try getting them out of their seats and into the corridors.” So, I did. I wrote up a dozen facts about Victorian London on coloured paper and put them on the walls at various points around the school.
Year 9 filtered into the room and took out their exercise books. When I announced that we were going to do a fact hunt, a murmur of excitement ran around the room. It felt electric. One student even declared me the best teacher in the school. Success!
After I made the rules of the hunt crystal clear, pairs of students diligently equipped themselves with worksheets and clipboards, and made their way into the corridor.
I trusted them. This Year 9 top set were like a gift from God - the sort of students who write notes while you talk or highlight key revision points without you ever asking them to.
Returning to my desk, I spun around in my swivel chair and surveyed my empty classroom. “What was Victorian London like?” was still frozen on the projector screen.
I imagined Year 9 returning at the specified time, sitting down and eagerly discussing the intricacies of industrialisation or the miserable lives of the city’s poor before using their newly acquired knowledge to answer the question in their books pretty much independently.
But that isn’t what happened. Instead, they arrived in dribs and drabs - some without their original partners and some without their worksheets. They were “engaged” all right, just like the observer had said, but not with the learning. It turned out Juan and Ella had fallen out during the hunt and she had dumped him. This was the subject of almost every conversation, and probably the reason that 70 per cent of their worksheets were blank. I was fuming.
When I went to send a quick email to their year group leader, I had two unread messages: one informing me that two of my students had entered the library; and another whole-school email asking whose class was in the corridor. Now, I was embarrassed, too.
I will never use corridor hunts again. First, it is questionable how much students learn when they’re roaming the school searching for information. They may copy it down but are they retaining it? Or will they sit in their exam desperately trying to recall key points, only to conjure up images of themselves prancing down the corridors waving to their friends through the gaps in doors instead?
The second problem occurs if there are multiple classes performing hunts at the same time. Not only does this mean there is chaos in the corridors as students catch up over the latest Snapchat faux pas but it also means there is information tacked up everywhere; dozens of sheets of paper that are not all relevant to your lesson.
Admittedly, it’s lovely to have a bit of peace and quiet while your students wander the school, but using that time to share information with them in the classroom is a much better way of ensuring relevancy.
Finally, the most obvious issue is that corridor fact-hunting is disruptive to other lessons. No matter how well-behaved students usually are, they won’t be able to stop themselves making faces or comments through open doors. Our colleagues have worked hard to plan their lessons; they should be able to deliver them without disruption.
Laura Tsabet is lead practitioner of teaching and learning at a school in Bournemouth. She tweets @lauratsabet
This article originally appeared in the 25 October 2019 issue under the headline “I’d rather have bums on seats than chaos in the corridor”
