Yes, you can teach kids with DVDs

You can’t stick a class of children in front of a Disney film for an afternoon while you do your marking and claim that you’re teaching them. If that’s what is happening in some schools Tom Bennett, the government’s discipline tsar, is absolutely right to condemn it roundly.

He is not right, however, to suggest that the use of DVDs and what he rather oddly calls “other activities” are “not teaching”. There is much more to good teaching than standing at the front of the classroom and delivering pearls of knowledge and wisdom although of course that is part of the job.

I used to show the 1979 (but timeless) film of Tarka the Otter to Year 8 as a research and factual writing exercise. I made the students take notes with a brief that afterwards for homework they had to write an essay about otters using the information gleaned from the film. It was a valuable assignment and worked so well that I did it repeatedly. Crucially though, I always sat and watched the film attentively with the class as a way of demonstrating that this was a serious piece of work. Moreover there were always some who went on to read Henry Williamson’s novel on which the film was based which was a learning bonus.

I also used three versions of Henry V on film when teaching the text to A-level English Literature students so that they could see each scene differently interpreted. And these are just random examples. There are many valid uses in school for film and modern technology makes it ever easier to use in class.

That is a very far cry from using film as a cop out. There is a tradition in many schools that lessons tail off towards the end of each term and that showing films (Mr Bennett cites a whole afternoon watching The Hunger Games) is justified. Well, it isn’t. Terms are already short and every single lesson should be used properly. My grandfather was a primary school teacher and refused steadfastly to compromise his standards with end-of-term wind-downs. He argued that because the children were getting tomorrow off they should work even harder today. And he had a point.

Enterprising teachers might, perhaps, use the very last lesson for a quiz related to the subject or for reading a relevant short story aloud perhaps but it certainly shouldn’t be an excuse to slump unthinkingly in front of a screen. That is never justified in school time.

As for other activities, Mr Bennett seems to mean students undertaking tasks rather than listening to the teacher lecturing. He mentions making posters. Well, if you’re trying, say, to sum up the most important points in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, explain Pythagoras’s theorem or the key incidents in Henry VIII’s reign what’s wrong with making a poster? Good teachers have always split classroom time between formal sharing of information and ideas and engaging the students in written or practical tasks which embed the learning.

The key thing I’d watch for vigilantly, if I were in Mr Bennett’s position, is the behaviour of the teacher during the activity. He or she should be proactively “cruising” the room, offering help and advice to individuals as they work – another form of teaching. It’s only if Sir or Miss is tidying the cupboard, marking another class’s homework, reading the newspaper or playing Candy Crush on his/her tablet at the front that there’s a problem. And, I haven’t invented that last example incidentally. A 13-year-old reported to me only last week that that’s what her teacher was doing while she and her classmates were writing up science notes.