How do pupils experience the pedagogy? - A Coherent Pedagogy for Secondary Schools

How do pupils experience the pedagogy?
A Year 7 pupil describes a typical lesson

"When the bell goes at the end of lessons you have to move quickly, but nobody fights in the line to grab a seat first in the next lesson because all the teachers give us our own places to sit and these only sometimes change.

I would like to sit with my mates but I don't really mind because I can see them and everybody else in the room when we are working. Even if I did sit nearer to my mates we wouldn't get much chance to chat, because the teachers can see us all too.

The first thing we always have to do is get our equipment ready and put our bags and things out the way. Each classroom has a space to put our stuff and because of how we are seated nobody fiddles with it because you would instantly see if anyone was out of their seat.

When we get to our seats there is usually something on the board or on the tables ready for us to look at and I know when the teacher wants to start the lesson because they always move to their favourite place in the room.

You need to make sure you've had a good look at what is up on the board or on the table because Miss will use it to get us thinking. She says it's to help us "get our minds into gear" or "give our brains a workout".

I like it because it stops you thinking about the lesson you've just had and helps you think about this lesson.

Miss will ask one of us to start off and talk about what we've been looking at and she'll remind us to speak clearly so everyone else can hear. Everybody gets to say something in the lesson.

You can't get out of it and most of the time it's OK because if someone does disagree with what you're saying Miss will ask them to say why and they have to let everybody listen.

Next, Miss will tell us how this first bit fits into the rest of the lesson. She puts up on the board for us what we are going to learn and we spend a couple of minutes talking about what this means.

She'll talk us through the activities we are going to move on to and tell us how they will help our learning. We always get to do something for ourselves and quite often we do things in pairs.

Before we start Miss will tell us how long we've got to do the activity and what she wants us to have done so that means you have to get a move on if you're going to have something to share.

As we are working Miss will come round and watch and listen and she'll sometimes ask us why we've done something or how we worked out an answer we've got.

When we’ve finished Miss will go back to her favourite place and get us to talk about our work. Sometimes we have to go up to the front and use the OHP to share what we’ve done with the others or show them how we did something or worked something out.

It can be a bit nerve-wracking especially at the start of the year when you don’t know everybody but then Miss got us to do things in pairs so it wasn’t like having to do it on your own.

Before the lesson finishes we always have to think about what we have learned and tell each other how we know we have learnt something.

If we have homework it will help us practise what we have been learning about in the lesson and make us think a bit too.

In most lessons we get just enough time to pack away before the bell goes again."