Secondary School Teachers
Teach one or more subjects within a prescribed curriculum to secondary school students and promote students' social, emotional, intellectual and physical development.
A Friday afternoon with Year 9 science
You are a secondary science teacher about to start the last lesson of the week with a lively Year 9 class and a practical experiment planned. It is 2pm on a hot Friday. The class is restless, the experiment needs careful supervision, and a few of the students have already given you a look that says they are not in the mood.
Choose what you would do. Then see what happens. There are often good reasons for each choice.
Miss, I am just checking the time. Everyone else is on theirs too. It is Friday afternoon, you know. Can we skip the experiment and just watch a video instead? That would be so much easier.
Take the phone off Dante and send him out of the room
The class goes silent, but Dante sulks for the rest of the lesson and the next three lessons too. Winning the moment cost you a relationship you needed.
Calmly ask Dante to put it away, explain what is happening in the lesson and why it matters, and give the class a clear first task
Dante puts the phone in his bag. The first task gets people moving and the mood changes. You managed the behaviour without making it a fight.
Agree to show the video, as the class is tired
The room is calm and quiet for forty minutes, but nothing is learned and the class remembers that moaning works. Kind, but costly next week.
Our group's experiment is not working. The numbers are nothing like the ones in the book. I think we did something wrong but we do not know what. Can you just tell us the right answer so we can write it down?
Give them the answer so they can finish the write-up on time and move on
They finish early and learn nothing. The wrong numbers were the interesting part, and now they have missed the point of the experiment.
Ask them to walk you through what they did, and let them find the step that went wrong
They spot one mistake and fix it. It takes most of the lesson, and the report is rushed. The learning was real, and a bit more time would have helped.
Ask what they did, point to where to look, and give them time to check and repeat
They find a measuring error, repeat the test and get a better result. They tell the next group what to watch for. Working out why you are wrong is real science.
I'm sorry to catch you now. My daughter says she is being left out by her group in your class and she has stopped wanting to come to school. I do not know who to speak to. Can you help me?
Thank her, listen fully, and say you will watch the group and speak to the year coordinator
Mrs Karagiannis is grateful to be heard. You and the coordinator move the groups in a natural way, and her daughter starts to settle. Teachers are often the first adult to hear about a problem.
Tell her it is probably a small disagreement that will sort itself out in a week or two
The matter does not sort itself out. Mrs Karagiannis comes back more upset, and her daughter has had another two weeks of feeling alone.
Tell her you cannot discuss other students and that she should email the school office about it
You protect privacy, but she leaves with a job to do and nothing started. You could have listened first and sent the concern on yourself.
How it went
The bell goes, the experiments are packed away and a worried parent has been heard. Secondary teaching is part subject expert, part referee and part coach, often in a single lesson. Would you like to be the teacher who helps a teenager see why something works?
This is a simplified, fictional situation to help you explore. It is not professional instruction or a test of your ability.
Case study: The Year 10 class that stopped asking questions
A fictional case set in a secondary school science and maths department, with classes from Year 7 to Year 12.
The situation
Ms Okoro taught Year 10 maths at Ironbark High, and her class had gone silent. When she asked if anyone had questions, nobody did, and yet test results showed many students were lost. She suspected they were embarrassed. A colleague suggested speeding up the course to get through all the content before exams, since there was so much to cover and the quiet class was at least not disruptive.
What they did
Ms Okoro decided to slow down and find out what was happening. She asked the class to write one thing they were stuck on on a scrap of paper, with no name, at the end of each lesson. She sorted the papers that night and started the next lesson by answering the most common ones. She also set up a short quiz with no marks to show her where the gaps were. After a few weeks, students started to ask questions aloud.
How it turned out
Test results improved, and the class became noisier in a good way. She did not get through every topic as planned, and she had to drop one unit. Ms Okoro said the trade was worth it, and that her colleague later started using the paper slips in his own class.
What would you do?
- Why might a silent class be a warning sign and not good news?
- How would you make it feel safe for a teenager to say they do not understand?
- What would you drop from a crowded course, and how would you decide?