More tips from Dylan Wiliam
Video transcript
right though there’s a danger you’ve peaked too soon though because that’s a brilliant tip why watch you what’s your second tip you’ve got for us well i was trying to come up with a series of tips at different levels of specificity and different aspects of teachers work so the second one concerns detention now there’s a big debate about whether detentions are useful or not but these days they’re often the only sanction that a teacher has and so the question for me is what should kids do in detention so obviously this there is the challenge of getting students to turn out and that depends on the school policy so some schools actually have a very clear policy that a teacher issue student detention and the student doesn’t turn up that automatically gets elegant elevated up to a deputy head and then they’re in the deputy heads detention so students know that if they don’t set up a detention it’s going to get more serious i think that’s really important the school culture is important but i think the really important point for me is what do students do during detention i think there’s two things the first is you must make it absolutely clear that this is not any bother at all for you so whenever i had kids in detention i always had a stack of marking to do and so it was kind of like i’m going to be here marking this work and it’s not inconveniencing me at all the other thing you have to watch out is that english teachers don’t like students being made to write lines because it destroys handwriting they also don’t like them to do being asked to do some kind of re writing about what they did wrong because become writing becomes a punishment and so i think if students have actually not done the work and the detention is there to help them catch up then i think it’s appropriate for students to do the work they missed but i don’t think they should be doing maths questions because it makes work the punishment i think the big message here is school work is not a punishment school work is a privilege because people in other countries who would love to have the opportunity to learn and advance their skills so i think we have to be very careful about the messages we send during detention and my personal preference is for students to do absolutely nothing in detention they just sit there and you know it’s really really boring anything you give to do makes it slightly less boring and therefore for me um you know make the punishment fit the crime to quote gilbert sullivan you know if if it’s lack of work then it’s appropriate to work but for the rest of the time i think just two things make sure that you they understand that you’d be there anyway doing the marking and don’t give them work that makes it harder for other teachers make it actually as boring as possible that’s really interesting well i’ll tell you now i fall into two traps there i i’ve done the opposite of what you’ve said for many years so first is i dread when i’m on detention duty and i make it very clear when i walk in i’m fed up i don’t want to be there i think i’ll even say that sometimes i don’t want to be here you don’t want to be here so that’s that’s an error straight away so i’ve made a note about that one but the second thing is i it always turns into almost like an intervention class because if the kids are doing maths and they know i’m a maths teacher i barely get to sit down and it’s hands up can you help with this and then the classic thing is of course if they say if you don’t help them well they say well i’m not doing anything i’m stuck i can’t help and then the behavior starts to unravel and so on so i’m going to find it hard i think for them to do nothing but i like the logic of it it’s i’m going to find it hard to enact but i’m on board with the logic i like that dylan well it’s only appropriate if they’re punishing being punished for bad behavior yeah if they’re there for not doing their work or not doing their homework or whatever then it’s entirely appropriate for them to make that up in homework makes sense okay you Dylan Wiliam