Student Agency in Year 10 English

It’s 8:30 am and the bell has rung, class is starting. It is Opposite Day here in the Year 10 “Weirdos Monsters and Outsiders” class. The teacher is carefully seated in a chair where normally a student would sit and five students are gathered at the front where normally a teacher would stand. By switching places and standing in the shoes of a teacher, we as students are responsible for teaching and leading the class in a lesson about a selected short story from Unnatural Creatures by Neil Gaiman.

I’m Jean and for my group’s teaching, we chose the story Ozioma the Wicked by Nnedi Okorafor because we wanted to explore deeper themes that seemed to be present in this text such as Abjection and the concept of what defines a Monster. This has been a huge learning experience for me because I never really understood what being a teacher entails, however now I realise that it is something that is often overlooked because it is much harder than it looks.

Being a teacher involves actively engaging a class, allowing students to trust you enough to share their ideas and opinions and creating the right classroom environment and atmosphere. We prepared a Kahoot to engage the class before a brief introduction of the text and then jumped right into the discussion. It was really interesting to see from a teacher’s perspective of our classroom dynamic. Our classroom became a vibrant and colourful atmosphere, with ideas being deliberated and tossed with an occasional and unanimous “ooh” when an original idea was being presented. Overall for me, this was a really rewarding experience and I enjoyed participating in this activity.

Not only is becoming a teacher for one period a completely different perspective but watching my peers giving presentations is a whole new experience.

I'm Ella and my group chose to do Prismatica by Samuel R. Delaney. By the time that we had finished our lesson, my group had felt how much effort our teacher's put into our classes. How hard it is to create engaging lessons and come up with fresh ideas and new activities that connect with what we learn. Watching our peers stand in front of the class, gives us an insight of different ways to perceive a text and introduce that perception in front of a large group of people. Some groups preferred to use Kahoots, others preferred to start class discussions. All ideas that we got from our teacher and ones that we learnt to appreciate. I noticed that we became more confident in class discussions and spent more time and care in each text as we went along. This was a great learning opportunity, one that taught us gratitude, dedication and confidence.

Ella C and Jean C, Year 10