ABSTRACT
The Year 9 pupils arrived. As usual they had come in dribs and drabs and took a while to settle. The teacher, Miss Gibbs, tried to avoid any loss of time by setting the pupils a task which they could work on individually while the others arrived. It was a Key Stage 3 history lesson about railways and the teacher set five questions based on the chapter in the class textbook, so that the pupils would begin to read about the topic and assimilate and apply the information while they waited for the whole class to assemble. She had allowed ten minutes for this activity, and then she planned to take answers to the questions and use them to build up the story of how railways had developed in the nineteenth century. Towards the end of the time she had set aside for the written work, she went round the class to see what the pupils had made of the task. To her annoyance, yet again this mixed ability class had done what she hated most. The problem was not that no one had done the work – most of the class had completed at least two or three of the questions – but how they had done it. Most of the pupils had answered the questions by copying chunks out of the textbook. ‘I've answered the questions, haven't I?’ said Donna, when Miss Gibbs protested. ‘Look, there's lots of writing – what's wrong with it?’ demanded Freddy. Their resentment at being asked to think for themselves was very clear. What could the teacher do about this?
