Bringing back a primary teaching style… Teaching storage

We often get told to treat students, particularly those in key stage 4 like young adults. Let’s prepare them for the world of work, teach them to be more independent and resilient and trust them to do the right thing while supervising and supporting where necessary. Achieving the balance between ‘spoon feeding’ and independent work is a real challenge. However, sometimes students might just want to be treated more like a little kid.

Recently, I started teaching secondary storage to my year tens. Now, in previous schools I taught this at a lot earlier stage so I decided to keep some of the slides/ideas that I use with lower years. I forewarned my year tens that I may come across as patronising or it might be a little cringe, but asked that they humoured me to see if the style worked. I said we’d discuss at the end so if they hated the style we’d revert back to a slightly more serious tone/teaching style.

What this looked like?

Students were asked to consider characteristics one might ought to consider when deciding on a secondary storage device. To prompt I found a clipart picture of two happy looking peas in a pod and 2 CDs, telling students that each letter stood for a characteristic PricePortabilityCapacityDurabilitySpeed[of access].

The image got a few chuckles and the students discussed, managing to work out all the characteristics. We then moved on to compare these with the secondary storage technologies. Once discussing how these work, with the more typical teacher talk and note taking, I channelled my younger year teaching self.

So students were told we had to focus on each letter of the technology. For optical I told them to draw an O around the o and asked what this looked like… a disc – a CD or DVD. I then had them repeat the O sound quietly, loudly, in a high pitch voice in a low pitch voice until someone asked me why. I told them that this sound is important with optical as this technology is – lOw in durability, cost, capacity and slOw in speed. For magnetic we all moved our arms to remember that there’s moving parts and we focused on why m was important – mid speed (faster than optical, slower than solid state), most capacity etc.

Now, I thought the students would have rolled their eyes or refused to participate but they really got into the lesson. When asking them to stand up or sit down (for True or False questions), having them repeat things back in silly voices etc, there was some laughs. In fact, the lesson was generally quite high energy. Yet, this not seem to compromise their learning. Looking at the books and doing the end of lesson check in, I was pleased with the high quality of work produced and the answers I was receiving. Fast forward a week the students were correctly applying the strategies to recall the key information.

I know there can be controversy over teaching tips and tricks, at risk of not developing student understanding enough or risking cognitive overload. However, with mixed ability classes it really is reassuring to see all of the students feeling successful by using these strategies. I have tended to try avoid more ‘childlike’ teaching practices with KS4, for fear of patronisation. However, I think sometimes I forget that ultimately it is still children sitting in front of me- even if they are at GCSE level. A bit of laughter and fun can never be a bad thing and we know that repetition should make the content stick too. So, I’m going to actively try adopt more Key stage 3 style teaching to my older lessons and see if it continues with such a positive response. Of course this might not always be possible but when opportunities arise I will look forward to it.

'Miss, I miss your weird ways to help us remember all the information. Now I've had to just start creating my own'....

A year 11 student from my previous school, told me this today which I think somewhat supports the above too.