As a teacher, I pride myself on being committed and passionate about helping students succeed; this includes students who are unmotivated. On my last placement, I was given the opportunity to teach a Year 12 English Essentials class who had an issue with behaviour and were generally unmotivated to learn.
The challenge was getting students to produce enough work that there would be quantifiable data to continue planning for learning and assessing. Students would groan when asked to copy notes down, and often would come to class without a notebook.
To mitigate this, I began to create worksheets with questions that were directly linked to the stimuli in the lesson which included a large range of visual and written texts about certain topics pertaining to animal handling – including zoos, animal testing, and SeaWorld in the US. Different stimuli presented different points of view, and students were encouraged to consider the persuasive devices being used, and how these devices presented a point of view.
This series of resources demonstrates the types of questions and stimuli afforded to students. The long answer questions towards the back of the worksheet also encourage students to present long answers, in preparation for an essay exam; this helped build confidence in students by carefully scaffolding and giving explicit instruction.
Georgia Ferguson 